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Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs of a Russian Life
Dangerous Thoughts Memoirs of a Russian Life Author:Yuri Orlov A Soviet dissident candidly recounts his State-encouraged training as a physicist, his involvement with the underground human rights movement, his imprisonment and exile in Siberia and his imigration to the United States. In a gripping autobiography, Soviet human rights activist Orlov, now a physicist at Cornell University, offers a searing glim... more »pse of Russia's tragic 20th century. His childhood village destroyed by Stalinist collectivization, the author, a factory worker during WW II, gradually became disillusioned with communism. His call for democracy in 1956 earned him exile to Armenia. Returning to Moscow in 1972, he rallied to the support of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, defending freedom of speech and religion. Arrested by the KGB in 1977, Orlov was sent to a labor camp, and in 1984, as a political exile, was shunted to an Arctic village. His freedom was secured as part of President Reagan's swap involving a Soviet spy and American journalist Nicholas Daniloff, falsely accused of espionage. In an understated literary masterpiece shot through with pungent Gorkyesque realism, Orlov lambastes Gorbachev for being "unable to confront the total bankruptcy of his old faith." Author tour. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Physicist Orlov became a human rights activist only after a productive 30-year career in science and membership in the Communist Party. This autobiography recounts his formative years with his peasant grandmother, his war years as a lathe operator in a military factory, and his slow, agonizing realization of the worth of each individual. The formation of the human rights monitoring group Helsinki Watch in 1976 led to his trial in 1978, to seven years in a labor camp in Siberia, and to his expulsion from the USSR in 1986. Unlike accounts by other Soviet dissidents, Orlov's story doesn't dwell on the suffering of the Soviet people during the Stalin years, nor does it concentrate on the agonies endured by prisoners in a labor camp. Instead, it is told with good humor and is utterly devoid of bitterness. Recommended for general collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/91. - Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.« less