Author and publisher Valery Nikolaevich Chalidze was a Soviet dissident and human rights activist, deprived of his USSR citizenship in 1972 while on a visit to the US.
23 Facts About Valery Chalidze
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Valery Chalidze's mother, Francheska Jansen, was an architect and designer, descended from Poles exiled to Siberia for their opposition to the Tsarist regime.
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Valery Chalidze was born in Moscow and educated as a physicist at the universities of Moscow and Tbilisi in Georgia.
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In 1972 Valery Chalidze was deprived of his Soviet citizenship and spent the rest of his life in the United States.
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Valery Chalidze wielded Soviet law in defense of many different people, including Crimean Tatars, students, Jews, Orthodox Christians, political prisoners, Baptists, and Muslims.
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Valery Chalidze went further than many dissidents in calling openly for the repeal of the Stalin-era law criminalizing homosexual relations between adult males.
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On 4 November 1970, together with Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, Valery Chalidze founded the Moscow Human Rights Committee.
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Valery Chalidze was an innovative strategist of the Soviet human-rights movement, who described himself as an "evolutionary" rather than a revolutionary.
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In 1972, Valery Chalidze was invited by the well-known American lawyer Samuel Dash to deliver a lecture on human rights at Georgetown University in Washington, DC Once there, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree depriving him of his Soviet citizenship, and prevented him from returning to the Soviet Union.
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Valery Chalidze then moved to England, and the two were divorced.
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In partnership with US businessman Ed Kline Valery Chalidze soon established Khronika Press.
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Valery Chalidze continued to work as a physicist, meanwhile, and for several years was a visiting scholar in the physics department at Columbia University.
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In 1979 Valery Chalidze became a citizen of the United States, after having been stateless since 13 December 1972.
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Valery Chalidze was retained by the US Department of State to assess Soviet violations of international human-rights covenants.
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Valery Chalidze's report issued in 1980, and identified with specificity and legal precision many such violations.
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In 1980 Valery Chalidze met Lisa Leah Barnhardt on a visit to Oregon.
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Valery Chalidze resided in Benson until his death on 3 January 2018, when he died unexpectedly at his home.
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In Vermont, Valery Chalidze continued to publish several journals and edited others such as Internal Contradictions.
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In total, Valery Chalidze Publications published almost one hundred books in Russian and in English, including the Kama Sutra, translated at Valery Chalidze's request by Vladimir Kozlosvsky.
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From 1985 to 1990 Valery Chalidze received a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of his work in international human rights.
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At the request of the US Administration, Valery Chalidze Publications organized and published the first-ever Russian translation of The Federalist Papers.
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Valery Chalidze himself served as Editor-in-Chief, and his wife Lisa Barnhardt Chalidze, an American attorney, was Legal Editor.
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Valery Chalidze never returned to the Soviet Union ; he did not see his mother again.