About Sergei Kovalev
Sergei Adamovich Kovalyov (also spelled Sergey Kovalev; Russian: Сергей Адамович Ковалёв; 2 March 1930 – 9 August 2021) was a Russian human rights activist and politician. During the Soviet period he was a dissident and, after 1975, a political prisoner. == Early career and arrest == Kovalyov was born in the town of Seredyna-Buda, near Sumy (in Soviet Union, now Ukraine). In 1932, his family moved to Podlipki village near Moscow. In 1954, Kovalyov graduated from Moscow State University and in 1964 he gained a PhD in biophysics. As a biophysicist, Kovalyov was author of more than 60 scientific publications. From the mid-1950s onwards, as a graduate student and a lecturer he opposed Trofim Lysenko's theories, then favored by Khrushchev and the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1969 Kovalyov was one of a group of dissidents who set up the Action Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, the first such independent body in the Soviet Union. The 14 members of the group first drew public and international attention when they and 38 supporters signed an Appeal about political persecution in the USSR and sent it, over the head of the Soviet government, to the United Nations; meanwhile a number of them also became involved as authors and editors in the samizdat (self-published) human rights quarterly, the Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1983) which first appeared in April 1968. The members of the Action Group came under pressure from the authorities and their statements and activities became intermittent.
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