Valery Chalidze, Soviet Dissident Forced Into Exile, Dies at 79

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Valery N. Chalidze, a theoretical physicist who, alongside the Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, campaigned to expose human rights abuses in the Soviet Union and then carried on that work in exile in the United States, died on Jan. 3 in Benson, Vt. He was 79.

His wife, Lisa Chalidze, confirmed the death but did not give a cause. She said he had largely recovered from a stroke he suffered in 2015.

Friends and colleagues from Mr. Chalidze’s dissident days recalled his passion for justice and rule of law and how he had counterintuitively used the Soviet system against itself in challenging it.

Rather than calling for revolution, he immersed himself in the Kremlin’s own often ignored legal statutes, memorizing them down to their minutiae, and then demanded that they be observed.

“He was viewed as a dedicated proponent of the view that Soviet law (in a liberal interpretation) should be the basis of action on human rights issues by both the authorities and dissident groups,” Peter Reddaway, professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University and former director of the Kennan Institute in Washington, wrote in an email.

Professor Reddaway was a co-editor with Mr. Chalidze of the English-language Chronicle of Human Rights in the U.S.S.R., based on materials smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

The dissident Pavel Litvinov, a grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister in the 1930s, said in an interview that holding Moscow to its own laws had presented “the possibility for dialogue, against discrimination of minorities, against violation of freedom of speech, against people being thrown into camps and prisons, being fired from work and held in psychiatric hospitals.”

In his memoirs, Sakharov, a nuclear physicist, wrote that he and Mr. Chalidze had been brought together in 1970 in a campaign to free the dissident Petro Grigorenko, a former Soviet Army general, from imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital.

For many years Mr. Chalidze operated out of a strikingly decorated communal apartment, where sables and daggers hung from a wall and collections of stones and dried scorpions were kept under glass. The room, along with Mr. Sakharov’s Moscow apartment, became a center for collecting signatures to petition the government on human rights issues. Mr. Chalidze often received visitors while reclining on his couch.

“In the dissident world, the nickname Prince stuck to him — and he wore it with dignity,” Mr. Sakharov wrote.

In 1970, Mr. Chalidze, with Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, also a physicist, created the Committee on Human Rights in the U.S.S.R., one of the Soviet Union’s first human rights organization.

Valery Nikolayevich Chalidze was born in Moscow on Nov. 25, 1938. His father, Nikolai, of Georgian descent, was an engineer who was killed in World War II; his mother, Francheska Yansen, was an architect who worked on designing the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

His mother was from a family of Polish freedom fighters who had been exiled to Russia under the czars and sent to labor camps known as the Gulag under Stalin. Yet Mr. Chalidze was a person “of absolutely Russian culture” who “loved Russia very much,” Mr. Litvinov said.

Mr. Chalidze and Mr. Litvinov had met at a dissident gathering in Moscow and remained friends and colleagues in disseminating dissident literature after both ended up in the United States in the 1970s. Mr. Chalidze’s first wife, Vera Slonim, was Mr. Litvinov’s cousin.

Mr. Chalidze studied physics at Moscow State University and in Tbilisi, Georgia. He was head of a physics laboratory when he became a dissident. He founded an underground journal, Social Issues, and defended the rights of the so-called refuseniks, Jews who had been denied emigration from the Soviet Union. He also learned how to repair typewriters — essential for disseminating underground literature, or samizdat.

He went even further out on a limb to defend the rights of gay people, ignoring colleagues in the human rights movement who said, “Don’t do that; it’s an inappropriate subject,” Mr. Litvinov said.

Mr. Chalidze challenged a Soviet law under which people could land in prison for five years on sodomy charges.

Soviet officials responded with a campaign of pressure, searching his apartment and raising suspicions about his own sexuality. “The authorities started to spread rumors that he is homosexual,” Mr. Litvinov said.

Mr. Sakharov and other dissidents were surprised in 1972 when Mr. Chalidze, invited to speak at American universities, was granted an exit visa and agreed to go; his colleagues assumed he would not be allowed to return.

Mr. Chalidze, however, said he wanted to prove that it was possible to leave and come back.

“He had one briefcase that he kept with him at all times” to avoid any possibility that the authorities might plant something on him, like drugs, Mrs. Chalidze said by telephone from Vermont.

In the United States, Soviet consular officials confiscated his passport, forcing him to remain.

In New York, he became involved in the publication of dissident literature, advising Robert Bernstein, at the time the president of Random House and later a founder of Human Rights Watch, on what material to publish. Random House published two books by Mr. Chalidze, “To Defend These Rights: Human Rights and the Soviet Union” and “Criminal Russia: A Study of Crime in the Soviet Union.”

He most important association was with Edward Kline, a retail heir who was aligned with the dissident movement and Mr. Sakharov. Mr. Chalidze and Mr. Kline created Khronika Press, which published underground material that had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union, often as carbon copies, and then smuggled it back in as printed works. Mr. Kline died in June; Sakharov died in 1989.

Mr. Chalidze also started his own imprint, Chalidze Publications, publishing works on political thought that dissidents in the Soviet Union had been deprived of.

Mr. Chalidze could become fixated on offbeat publishing ideas. Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University, said that at one point Mr. Chalidze wanted to publish a pre-revolutionary translation of an ancient text on sexual behavior.

“Suddenly he rings up and says he wants to publish the Kama Sutra,” Professor Cohen said. “And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘It would be useful for the Russians.’ ”

He had selected a translation without illustrations. (It is not clear if it was ever published.)

Mr. Chalidze moved to Vermont in 1983 with his second wife, the former Lisa Barnhardt, a lawyer whom he had met in Oregon in 1980. They settled on 500 acres on Lake Champlain, and he began building houses and raising horses.

He also continued to publish, including a book his own, a Russian-language study titled “Stalin: Conquerer of Communism.” In 1992 he started a new publication, Central Asia Monitor.

With his wife, he edited and published a translation of the Federalist Papers, which President George Bush presented to the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev as a gift during a summit meeting in 1990.

Mr. Chalidze was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1985, lectured at Yale University and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University over the years. He also continued his research in theoretical physics.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Maria, who lives in London; two grandchildren; and a sister, Francheska, who lost her job as a Soviet scientist because of Mr. Chalidze’s dissident activities and eventually settled in San Diego.

Mr. Chalidze’s path never crossed with that of Vermont’s other well-known resident Soviet dissident, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, who lived there in exile until returning to Russia in 1994.

The two clashed in writing, however, over their differing interpretations of freedom. Mr. Solzhenitsyn suggested that Mr. Chalidze had collaborated with the K.G.B. to leave the Soviet Union. Mr. Chalidze likened Mr. Solzhenitsyn to an Islamic fundamentalist “ayatollah.”

Mr. Chalidze never went back to Russia, and never saw his mother again, although Soviet officials offered to restore his citizenship under Mr. Gorbachev. Mr. Chalidze dismissed the offer. His wife recalled him saying in response, “You had no right to take it away, and you certainly have no right to give it back.”