Andrei Amalrik

Russian writer and one of the most prominent Soviet dissidents. Amalrik was best known for his 1969 essay, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?

He was first arrested in 1965 after attempting to send his university thesis to a Danish Slavic scholar, the late Adolf Stender-Pedersen. Unaccountably, he later wrote in his memoir Involuntary Journey to Siberia, the Danish embassy turned it over to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, which passed it along to the KGB for vetting.

Amalrik was cleared of criminal activities at this stage but now was in the sights of the KGB.

A short time later, for daring to live outside the system, he was convicted of "parasitism" and exiled to Siberia for two and a half years. The sentence was reversed in 1966, however, and he returned to Moscow. His next clash with authority came after publication abroad of his "1984" essay, a clear crime under Soviet law of the day. He was picked up in 1970 and shipped off to the Kolyma region in the far east of the country, the most feared isle of the Gulag Archipelago, for three years of hard labor followed by a term of exile. In 1975 he was back in Moscow, rearrested as a parasite, and was expelled to the Netherlands in 1976.

On November 12, 1980, Amalrik died in suspicious car accident on his way to Madrid to attend an East-West conference called to review the Helsinki Accords of 1975.