Valery Chalidze

Valery Chalidze ( _ka. ვალერი ჭალიძე; _ru. Валерий Николаевич Чалидзе, "Valeriy Nikolayevich Chalidze") (born 1938) is a Georgian-American author, publisher, and the former Soviet dissident and human rights activist.

Chalidze was born in Moscow. He was educated as a physicist at the universities of Moscow and Tbilisi. In the mid-1960s, he joined the Soviet human rights movement and published a samizdat magazine "Obshchestvennye problemy" ("The Social Problems"). In 1970 Chalidze, along with Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, became one of the three founding members of the Moscow Human Rights Committee. The Committee was the first non-governmental organization in the history of the Soviet Union, and eventually became affiliated with the United Nations. Its purpose was to offer free legal advice to persons whose human rights had been violated by the Soviet Government, and also to advise the Soviet Government on its legal obligations in regard to human rights under international and Soviet law. In 1972, he was invited to deliver a lecture in the United States and was promptly deprived of Soviet citizenship and prevented from returning to the Soviet Union. He promptly established Khronika Press in New York City, which published Russian-language books and important human-rights periodicals such as The Chronicle Of Current Events, detailing with scrupulous accuracy human rights violations in the Soviet Union. In 1979 he founded Chalidze Publications in New York City, which published primarily Russian-language non-fiction books of cultural importance that were otherwise unavailable to Soviet readers due to censorship. Chalidze Publications issued original memoirs of historically-important figures, including Nikita Khrushchev, and of Soviet dissidents whose work was banned in their home country, Russian translations of classic Western works of political philosophy, and original analyses of social problems. After his marriage in 1981 to Lisa Leah Barnhardt, the two moved to Benson Vermont in 1983 which became the home of Chalidze Publications and Khronika Press. Chalidze published and edited several journals including Khronika tekushchikh sobytij (Chronical of Current Events), SSSR: Vnutrennie protivorechija (USSR: Internal Contradictions) and Russia. Chalidze Publications would eventually publish close to 100 titles in English and Russian, including the hitherto unpublished materials retrieved from the Trotsky archive at Harvard University as well as the memoirs of Trotsky and his own works on the Trotskyite opposition and the Soviet dissident movement. Chalidze Publications also organized and published the first-ever Russian translation of The Federalist Papers in 1990, at the request of the U.S. Government, for presentation as the official presidential gift from George H.W. Bush to Gorbachev at their planned summit meeting. The primary translator of Amerikanskie Federalisti was Gregory Freidin of Stanford, with consultation from Leon Lipson of Yale Law School. Chalidze and Lisa Barnhardt Chalidze edited the work, which was quoted by both Gorbachev and Yeltsin in their historic debates in the Russian parliament during the final months of the Soviet Union. In 1985-90 Chalidze was a MacArthur Fellow for his work in international human rights.In his book Conqueror of Communism, published in New York City in 1981, Chalidze illustrated Joseph Stalin as a counterrevolutionary leader who destroyed socialism in Russia. He maintained that Stalin "restored the Russian empire although in a more despotic form" [1] and used Marxist ideology to mask his real aim.

Chalidze has written more than twenty books, including "To Defend These Rights: Human Rights and the Soviet Union" (1975), "Criminal Russia: Essays on Crime in the Soviet Union" (1977), "The Soviet Human Rights Movement: A Memoir" (1984), "O rechevom kode mozga" (On the linguistic brain code, 1985), "Mozgovoi kod i paleolingvistika" (Brain code and paleolinguistics), "English and Russian text" (1986), "Natsional’nye problemy i perestrojka" (Nationality problems and perestroika, 1988), "Hierarchical instinct and human evolution: a socio-biological approach", edited by Lisa Chalidze (1992). [ru icon [http://www.peoples.ru/state/correspondent/valery_chalidze Валерий Николаевич Чалидзе] . "Peoples.ru". Retrieved on May 5, 2007.] [ ru icon [http://www.hronos.km.ru/biograf/bio_ch/chalidze.html Валерий Николаевич Чалидзе] Retrieved on July 17, 2007] [Wertsman, Vladimir F., [http://www.everyculture.com/multi/Du-Ha/Georgian-Americans.html Multicultural America.Georgian Americans.] "Every Culture". Retrieved on May 5, 2007.]

References

External links

* [http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/pdf/67-5-222.pdf "Valeri Chalidze Under Pressure from KGB".] Radio Free Europe Research, July 31, 1971. "Open Society Archives".