On a frigid Moscow morning in 1977, physicist Yuri Orlov
watched as the KGB men drove up to his apartment and
exited their black car. A year earlier, Orlov had founded
the Moscow Helsinki Group to monitor the Soviet Union’s
adherence to the human rights provisions of the Helsinki
Accords. As the number of abuses documented by the group
grew, so too did surveillance and searches of its members.
Each month, the state confined more of the group’s activists
in Siberian gulags and psychiatric wards. As Orlov saw the
car approach on that cold morning, he knew that at last
they had come for him. After lengthy interrogations, Orlov
was convicted of treason and sentenced to seven years in a
strict regime labor camp and five years of exile.
_________________
On July 15, 2009, Natalia Estemirova exited her apartment
in Grozny, Chechnya, where she had been working
with Human Rights Watch and other organizations to document
the executions, torture, and abductions perpetrated
by the Russian-backed government there. A group of men
seized her in an unmarked sedan outside her home as
neighbors heard her scream that she was being kidnapped.
She was found the next day in the woods of Ingushetia
with close-range bullet holes in her head.

After initiating a wave of human rights activism across the Soviet bloc, the Moscow
Helsinki Group’s handful of remaining members disbanded in 1982 in the face of para-
lyzing state-sanctioned repression. This summer marked the 20th anniversary of the
group’s hopeful refounding on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse. However, in a
haunting revival of the repression that forced the group’s dissolution, human rights
workers in Russia again live in fear. After Estemirova’s murder in July, the bodies
of husband-and-wife activists Zarema Sadulayeva and Alik Dzhabrailov surfaced in
Chechnya in August, also with execution-style bullet wounds.
In the 70s, those who worked to protect human rights by publicizing their violation
were persecuted with the public fanfare of trials and received the heavy attention of
Western governments. In 2009, Estemirova and others investigating abuses have disap-
peared in silence. As the body count rises and human rights work freezes, the years
between Orlov’s arrest and Estemirova’s murder offer mixed lessons on overcoming
hostility towards human rights work in Russia—work fueled by courage and paid for
in blood.