The grandson of
Ivy Low and
Maxim Litvinov,
Joseph Stalin's
foreign minister during the 1930s, Pavel Litvinov was raised amongst the
Soviet elite. As a schoolboy, he was devoted to the
cult of Stalin, and was tapped, unsuccessfully, by the
KGB to report on his parents Flora and Misha Litvinov (a story that is related by the journalist
David Remnick in his book ''
Lenin's Tomb''). After the
death of
Joseph Stalin in 1953 and the return of family friends from the labour camps, Pavel grew disillusioned with the Soviet system. He had a short-lived marriage when he was seventeen. In his twenties, he became a physics teacher at the Institute for Chemical Technology. It was while he was working at the Institute that he became acquainted with a group of intellectuals who were following the show-trials of the dissidents
Andrei Sinyavsky and
Yuli Daniel. His immersion in
samizdat literature at this time brought him into contact with the works of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Varlam Shalamov and
Robert Conquest. He participated in petition campaigns in the USSR and compiled the samizdat collections "Justice or Punishment" (1967) and "
The Trial of the Four" (1968, about the trial of
Alexander Ginzburg,
Yuri Galanskov,
Alexey Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lashkova). When Ginzburg and Galanskov were tried for publishing samizdat in 1967, Pavel Litvinov and
Larisa Bogoraz released their famous "Appeal to World Community"; the first open appeal of Soviet dissidents to the West, it appealed to the international public to protest against the closed trial. The replies that he received from Soviet citizens were smuggled abroad and published in book form in 1969. Most were sympathetic, though the collection also included hate mail that attacked Litvinov for being a Jew and for his supposed lack of patriotism. Litvinov's exchange of correspondence with
Stephen Spender inspired the formation of the
Writers and Scholars Educational Trust and its journal
Index on Censorship. Over the following years, Litvinov became active in the dissident civil rights movement and was an editor of its regular samizdat bulletin
Chronicle of Current Events. The periodical, founded in 1968, documented searches, arrests, and court proceedings in Russia and other Soviet states. During 1967, he compiled a book on the trial of
Vladimir Bukovsky and three others. Summoned to the headquarters of the
KGB in October 1967, he was threatened with arrest if the book was published, but he ignored the threat and arranged for it to be published abroad as
The Demonstration in Pushkin Square. He compiled a similar book about the
Trial of the Four. On 25 August 1968, Litvinov was one of the participants in the
1968 Red Square demonstration against the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that had taken place four days earlier. Among the others were
Larisa Bogoraz, a philologist, the poets
Natalya Gorbanevskaya and
Vadim Delaunay,
Viktor Fainberg, an art critic, and Vladimir Dremlyuga, a history student. They raised banners in Czech and Russian expressing support for Czechoslovak independence and solidarity with
Alexander Dubček, the Czechoslovak leader who was the architect of the
Prague Spring. The KGB arrested the protesters and beat them; they were tried in secret that October. Litvinov was sentenced to five years' exile in
Chita, Zabaykalsky Krai,
Siberia. In 1974, after his return from exile, Litvinov and his wife Maya left the Soviet Union and travelled to
Vienna by
train. From there, they relocated to
Rome before moving to the
United States. In New York, Litvinov joined fellow
émigré dissident
Valery Chalidze in publishing
A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, which documented political repression. Litvinov currently lives in the
United States, where he taught
physics and
mathematics at the
Hackley School in
Tarrytown,
New York from 1976 until his retirement in 2006. ==Other==