Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov is a famous Soviet, and since the 1970s, American physicist, teacher. In the Soviet period of his life, he took an active part in human rights and protest activities. Participated in the famous political protest "Demonstration of Seven."
Biography
The future scientist was born in July 1940 in the capital of the Soviet Union, Moscow. Pavel was born in a family of Soviet intelligentsia, his father Maxim Maksimovich Litvinov was an outstanding mathematician and engineer. Mother worked as a physiologist at the Botkin Hospital. Pavel studied well and closer to graduation he began to think about his future, he decided to follow his father’s example and connect his life with science.
At sixteen, Paul, like most teenagers, woke up in a spirit of rebellion. He categorically denied the correctness of Stalin’s policies, as well as the policies of the Communist Party as a whole. He read a lot and understood that the path of Lenin and the path along which the modern Communist Party was moving were very different. Pavel often discussed politics and the current situation in society with his comrade Slava Luchkov, they dreamed someday to create an underground organization that would fight the regime’s actions.
Human rights and career
After school, Litvinov entered the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Physics, which he successfully graduated in 1966. Immediately after graduation, he got a job as a physics teacher at the Institute of Fine Chemical Technologies in Moscow.
He also began to take an active part in various protests and human rights events. He was a signatory to all significant petitions. In 1967, he began to take part in the compilation of samizdat magazines. The first collection was published in the same year and was called “Justice and Reprisal”. The following year, his second work was published on the lawsuit known in the USSR, which was called the “Process of Four”.
In the late sixties, democratic processes began in Czechoslovakia, mitigating reforms were carried out, and this largely shook the credibility of the local Communist Party. All this could not but affect the citizens of the USSR, many with hope followed the process in the fraternal republic and waited for changes in their homeland. The inevitability of change was also understood by the leaders of the Soviet Union, and in 1968 a decision was made to send troops to Czechoslovakia in order to suppress the unrest.
On August 25 of the same year, the famous rally "Demonstration of Seven" was held on Red Square in Moscow. A group of Soviet dissidents came out with posters and slogans expressing their dissatisfaction with the introduction of troops into Czechoslovakia. At that moment, the rally did not cause a wide resonance, and most of the protesters were simply jailed. Pavel Litvinov was one of those dissidents and received four years in the camps.
In 1974 he emigrated to the United States, where he lives to this day in the town of Territown, continuing to engage in science and human rights activities.
