First Andrei Sakharov Prize for human rights goes to Cornell physicist and former Soviet gulag prisoner Yuri Orlov

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov05/Orlov.award.ed.lg.html

Nov. 14, 2005

By Lauren Gold
lg34@cornell.edu

In stature, Yuri Orlov, 81, is small. But in every other dimension, he is a giant.

Orlov, a senior scientist in Cornell University's F.R. Newman Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics, is the first recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize, created by the American Physical Society (APS) to honor scientists for exceptional work in promoting human rights. The prize will be presented at the April meeting of the APS in Dallas.

As a physicist, Orlov is known for his expertise in quantum mechanics and particle accelerator design. He studied under the legendary theorist Lev Landau and others at the Physico-technical Department of Moscow University until he lost his research position in the 1950s for speaking out for democratic rights. Narrowly avoiding imprisonment, he left Moscow for the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia, where he finished his doctoral degree (1958) and ultimately became chief of the Laboratory of Electro-magnetic Interaction.

In 1973 Orlov returned to Moscow to a research position at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism and Distribution of Radio-Waves. He co-founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International that year; three years later he founded the Moscow Helsinki Group, one of the first efforts in the international Helsinki human rights monitoring movement. In 1977 he was arrested by the KGB and sent to the gulag, a hard-labor camp in Siberia.