Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov (; born 6 July 1940) is a Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident. Biography The grandson of Ivy Low and Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, Pavel Litvinov was raised amongst the Soviet elite. As a schoolboy, he was devoted to the cult of Stalin, and was tapped, unsuccessfully, by the KGB to report on his parents Flora and Misha Litvinov (a story that is related by the journalist David Remnick in his book Lenin's Tomb). After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and the return of family friends from the labour camps, Pavel grew disillusioned with the Soviet system. He had a short-lived marriage when he was seventeen. In his twenties, he became a physics teacher at the Institute for Chemical Technology. It was while he was working at the Institute that he became acquainted with a group of intellectuals who were following the show-trials of the dissidents Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. His immersion in samizdat literature at this time brought him into contact with the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov and Robert Conquest. He participated in petition campagins in the USSR and compiled the samizdat collections "Justice or Punishment" (1967) and "The Trial of the Four" (1968, about the trial of Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Alexey Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lashkova). When Ginzburg and Galanskov were tried for publishing samizdat in 1967, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz released their famous "Appeal to World Community"; the first open appeal of Soviet dissidents to the West, it appealed to the international public to protest against the closed trial. The replies that he received from Soviet citizens were smuggled abroad and published in book form in 1969. Most were sympathetic, though the collection also included hate mail that attacked Litvinov for being a Jew and for his supposed lack of patriotism. Litvinov's exchange of correspondence with Stephen Spender inspired the formation of the Writers and Scholars Educational Trust and its journal Index on Censorship. Over the following years, Litvinov became active in the dissident civil rights movement and was an editor of its regular samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events. The periodical, founded in 1968, documented searches, arrests, and court proceedings in Russia and other Soviet states. During 1967, he compiled a book on the trial of Vladimir Bukovsky and three others. Summoned to the headquarters of