Alexander Pavlovich Lavut (Russian: Алекса́ндр Па́влович Лаву́т; 4 July 1929 – 23 June 2013) was a mathematician, dissident and a key figure in the civil rights movement in the Soviet Union.
Ginzburg had been arrested as one of the compilers, with Yuri Galanskov, of the White Book documenting the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.
[5] It documented the extensive human rights violations committed by the Soviet government and the ever-expanding samizdat publications (political tracts, fiction, translations) circulating among the critical and opposition-minded.
[2][6][7] Lavut was particularly active in campaigning on behalf of the Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group forcibly exiled to Central Asia under Stalin in 1944 and not permitted to return once the Soviet dictator was dead.
[1][8] On 29 April 1980, Lavut was arrested and charged with Anti-Soviet agitation under Article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code: "the dissemination of knowingly false fabrications discrediting the Soviet social and political system".
The prosecution argued that Lavut "participated in the discussion, production, signing and distribution on the territory of the USSR and abroad of knowingly false fabrications ... about alleged violations of civil rights, of the use of psychiatry for political ends."
The trial became the subject of a memorandum by the dissident human rights organization Moscow Helsinki Group; Andrei Sakharov included Lavut's name in an open appeal to colleagues.
In 1988, Andrei Sakharov succeeded in obtaining official permission for Lavut to join a Soviet-American commission on civil and political rights and go to Washington.
An opponent of Yeltsin's First Chechen War (1994–1996), Lavut was briefly detained in December 1994 during an unsanctioned picket of the presidential administration in Moscow's Old Square (Staraya ploshchad).