Alexander Lavut - Telegraph Throughout his incarceration and subsequent exile, Lavut had a friend and champion in Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. Himself exiled to Gorky, Sakharov wrote an open letter to the scientific community, calling upon his colleagues" sense of "common duty" and including Lavut's name in the list of persecuted individuals whose causes he espoused. He renewed the struggle after his release from Gorky, and in 1988 succeeded in obtaining official permission for Lavut to join a Soviet-American commission on civil and political rights in Washington. "This is how heroes look," wrote The New York Times . Back in Russia, Lavut often found that public attitudes towards himself and his fellow campaigners remained entrenched in the old philosophies of the Soviet Union. People treat us with a certain respect and sympathy, but far from all. A lot of people think we aren't needed and are even harmful. Born on July 4 1929, Alexander Pavlovich Lavut graduated from the Mechanics and Mathematics faculty of Moscow State University in 1951 and subsequently taught at secondary schools in the city, and in Kazakhstan. His political activities began while he was employed at Moscow State University when, in 1968, he added his name to an open letter in defence of the poet Alexander Ginzburg. In May 1969, with Sergei Kovalev, he joined the Initiative Group for the Defence of Human Rights, the first such organisation in Soviet history, signing an open letter to the UN Human Rights Commission. Of Lavut's 14 co-signatories, 10 would later be arrested and imprisoned, and Lavut lost his job in November that year. They hunted us, and viciously. We were constantly being watched and listened to," he recalled. My apartment was only searched twice - the second time was when they came for me. After his return to Moscow in 1986 Lavut became a programmer at the Central Geophysical Expedition. For many years he campaigned on behalf of the Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group forcibly exiled under Stalin in 1944. An active opponent of Russia's wars in Chechnya, he was arrested in December 1994 during an unsanctioned picket of the administration of the Russian Federation in Staraya Square. In May the following year he became a representative of an observer mission to the Chechen conflict zone sent by several human rights NGOs. He was a member of the Public Committee for the Preservation of Legacy of Andrei Sakharov, and served on the board of Memorial, an international civil rights society. Alexander Lavut married Serafima Mostinskaya, with whom he had one child. Alexander Lavut, born July 4 1929, died June 23 2013