ABSTRACT
In September 1969, Sergei Adamovich Kovalyov reluctantly left his friends and colleagues at Moscow State University. The thirty-nine-year-old biologist, author of over eighty academic articles and head of the laboratory on mathematical methodology, had just been forced to resign for his active participation in the Soviet Union’s first nongovernment human rights organization, the Initiative Group for the Defence of Human Rights. His resignation from the Soviet Union’s most prestigious university marked the end of a successful scientific career and the beginning of a public life as one of the world’s most prominent human rights advocates.
