The Moscow Helsinki Group was one of Russia's leading human rights organisations. It was originally set up in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords and to report to the West on Soviet human rights abuses. It had been forced out of existence in the early 1980s, but was revived in 1989 and continued to operate in Russia.
Yuri Orlov, a founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, in 1986
Moscow Helsinki Group members Yuliya Vishnevskya, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Dina Kaminskaya and Kronid Lyubarsky in Munich, 1978
Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov was a particle accelerator physicist, human rights activist, Soviet dissident, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a founding member of the Soviet Amnesty International group,. He was declared a prisoner of conscience while serving nine years in prison and internal exile for monitoring the Helsinki human rights accords, he was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International as a founder of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. Following his release from exile, Orlov was allowed to emigrate to the U.S. and became a professor of physics at Cornell University.
Orlov in 1986
A street in Kobyay