Andrei Nikolayevich Tverdokhlebov (Russian: Андре́й Никола́евич Твердохле́бов, 30 September 1940, Moscow – 3 December 2011, Pennsylvania, United States) was a Soviet physicist, dissident and human rights activist.
"For the next week, a good half of all broadcasts over the Voice of America, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle were about the Committee, stressing its significance as an independent association that would study human rights objectively and then publish its findings.
"[4]: 320 In February 1971, Tverdokhlebov and his associate, Chalidze, were summoned to the Moscow Procurator's Office and told that "the existence of their committee was an infringement of the law, and that by carrying on their activities, they were laying themselves open to criminal prosecution.
During the search, several items were confiscated: three issues of the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church; a copy of The Gulag Archipelago; three issues of A Chronicle of Human Rights [New York];[6] an issue of the Bulletin of the Council of Relatives of Evangelical-Christian Baptist Prisoners; documents in defense of civil rights; lists of addresses of political prisoners and their families; lists of addresses of German families wishing to emigrate to the Federal Republic of Germany (about 2,000 families); materials about the situation in labor camps and prisons; notebooks; a typewriter; and a tape recorder.
"[10] In April 1976, the Moscow Municipal Court sentenced Tverdokhlebov to five years in exile for "dissemination of fabrications, known to be false, which discredit the Soviet State and social system".
According to a New Scientist article from 1976, the village only had a few hundred inhabitants and was cut off from normal transport for eight months of the year due to extreme weather conditions.