18 February 2026
by Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: Facebook
Yesterday, Ira Valitova passed away in Moscow. Lively, restless, energetic, uncompromising – emotionally, she was the complete opposite of her husband, Yuri Orlov, a doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Yuri Fyodorovich was a gentle, reasoning, calm person, while she would flare up like a match at any injustice or offence. Probably opposites do attract.
How she would drive the Chekists mad: both those who followed us at our heels and those who interrogated us in their offices on Lubyanka Square. They hated her sincerely from the bottom of their hearts, not just because of their jobs. One operative from among those involved in day-to-day surveillance even complained to me once that you could at least talk to the wives of other dissidents, but with her it was better not to even start, because she would simply insult you. It’s true, she couldn’t stand them and never missed an opportunity to let them know it.
Once, in 1977, I happened to be at their home during a search. Much later, I described this in my book Between Prison and Freedom: Memoir of a Soviet Dissident , and I would like to quote the relevant chapter here. If I were writing this chapter now, I would dedicate it to Ira Valitova.
RiR is pleased to republish below the relevant extract in English translation by Marian Schwartz, Chapter 14 of Between Prison and Freedom: Memoir of a Soviet Dissident by Alexander Podrabinek © 2025 by the University of Notre Dame. Excerpted with permission of the publisher.
THE BELYAEVO TRIANGLE
On January 4, at ten in the morning, I was ringing the bell at the Ginzburgs’ apartment on Volgin Street, in the micro-district of Belyaevo in Moscow’s southwestern sector. I had to ring for a long time. No one was opening up. Finally I heard sounds behind the door, and then the purposely loud voice of Arina, Alik’s wife: “But why won’t you let me open the door?” I plunged head over heels down the stairs. Clearly there was a search under way at the Ginzburgs’. I had to warn everyone. I ran to the nearest payphone. It swallowed my two-kopek coin but refused to work. I ran across the road to another booth. Fortunately, the phone was working. No one picked up the phone at Orlov’s. There was no answer at the Grigorenkos’ at all. At last I was able to reach Tatyana Mikhailovna Velikanova but wasn’t able to say anything; after my first few words the connection was dropped. I was out of coins and my fingers were stiff from the cold, so I decided to go to Orlov’s, which fortunately was a stone’s throw away. Maybe his phone had simply been turned off, I decided.
Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov lived with his wife Irina Valitova, a petite and very energetic woman of about thirty, in a two-room apartment on the first floor of the kind of ordinary five-story prefab building known as a khrushchovka. It was five minutes’ walk from the Ginzburgs’ and more or less the same from both of them to Valentin Turchin’s building. Among Moscow dissidents, this place was called the Belyaevo Triangle, although so far no one had ever disappeared there without a trace.
I rang at the apartment and then saw the door was ajar. Amazed at their absent-mindedness, I pushed it and walked into the front hall. A stranger came toward me whose face I couldn’t make out in the dim light. Politely inquiring whether I’d come to see Orlov, he suggested I come in and himself went to shut the door behind me. I went in. The apartment was full of strangers, and in the middle of them Ira suddenly appeared, clasping her hands.
“Ah, Sasha, is that you? Come in. You see what we have happening here?”
There was a search under way at Orlov’s, too.
I thought wistfully that they were about to confiscate my notebook and I would have to get my duplicate from its hidey-hole and copy out every thing again. Deciding to hide it, I headed for the toilet but before I could get there I was intercepted by courageous operatives and carefully searched. My notebook was confiscated.
I was still consumed by the idea of warning the others about the searches, and I started getting ready to leave. This was not to be, though. The senior investigator for exceptionally special cases from the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, Aleksandr Ivanovich Tikhonov, who was in charge of the search, ordered them not to let anyone leave the apartment. The mouse trap had snapped shut. “Oh well,” I thought, “I can’t warn anyone, so let’s enjoy the event. Ultimately, I’ve lucked out. I’m at a search at Yuri Orlov’s!”
In those days, it was considered a matter of honor among dissidents to come over when friends were being searched and support them in the almost inevitable squabble with the investigators and operatives. However, we weren’t always let into the apartment. A couple of hours later, friends who had learned about it all began arriving, but at the door they were met by a specially posted policeman who dully repeated that there was no entry. I was the only guest at this party!
The atmosphere at the search grew tense. The door to the apartment had been open not due to the residents’ absent-mindedness, as I’d thought at first—it had been broken down by order of the investigator, since they were not being let into the apartment. It took them fifteen minutes to break it down, during which time Yuri Fyodorovich and Ira were able to prepare a little for their unwanted guests.
The broken door set the tone for the entire search, which lasted until late in the evening. The friends who had come to the search shouted words of greeting through an open window, told us that searches were also under way at three other homes: Alik Ginzburg’s; his mother, Lyudmila Ilinichna’s; and Lyudmila Alexeyeva’s. The operatives attempted to drive our friends away from the windows, and then they would shut the windows, after which Ira would raise serious hell because she had “nothing to breathe” and “you’ve got no business giving orders” anyway, and they would reopen the windows.
In revenge, Inspector Tikhonov would not let Ira go to the store for food, and we had to make do with what there was—tea and cookies and some candies. Yuri Fyodorovich, a man of rare common sense and good nature, said, “Irochka, might we pour them some tea, too? After all, they’ve had nothing to eat all day.”
To which feisty Ira replied gaily and loudly enough to be heard in every room, “Why should we? They’ll manage, it’s good for them. Look at the tubs on them!”
The Prosecutor’s Office’s men conducting the search really were quite well fed, except perhaps for Tikhonov himself—a well-groomed man, bilious and obviously displeased with something. They all made faces but silently were listening to Ira’s rants, pretending they were such high-class pros they couldn’t bother reacting to those trifles.
Ira, meanwhile, really cut loose. At a certain point, one of the operatives decided to search the ceiling lamp hanging in the living room almost right over the piano—a parting gift from Andrei Amalrik when he left for the West. Ira categorically forbade them to move the piano aside, saying the instrument would immediately go out of tune and Tikhonov would have to have it tuned at his own expense. Tikhonov didn’t like that idea. They dragged in a chair from the kitchen, and the youngest operative was just about to climb on it when Ira shouted out at him that he’d better not get a decent chair dirty with his muddy Chekist soles. The operative asked for a newspaper. They didn’t keep Soviet newspapers in that home, though, and the foreign ones had already been confiscated as material evidence of Orlov’s anti-Soviet activity. They were also refused a rag of any kind. The investigators were worn out. They sent the youngest to the kiosk for a newspaper, and eventually the operative, having neatly laid down a nice fresh newspaper, climbed onto the chair, curled up like a question mark, and in that uncomfortable pose searched the ceiling lamp, making sure that there was no hard currency, or samizdat, or weapon hidden there. How could all that be hidden in the most ordinary ceiling lamp anyway?
At the end of the day we turned on the radio and heard from the news on Voice of America that during the search at Ginzburg’s apartment they had taken his silverware and hard currency planted there by the investigator. We decided to redouble our attention, although as it was, each had been monitoring his own territory since early morning: Yuri Fyodorovich the study, which was also the bedroom; Ira the living room; and I the kitchen, bathroom, and toilet. The searches at Orlov’s and Ginzburg’s were still under way, but the Western radio stations were already broadcasting this information to the whole world. The investigators and operators listened to the news with long faces, bewildered as to how it was that the dissidents had managed so quickly to spread information that they, the investigators, considered confidential and not subject to dissemination.
Meanwhile, their patience was wearing thin. They considered open listening to Western “voices” in their presence to be a personal insult and demeaning to their professional dignity. The Soviet people were supposed to be afraid, and everyone was afraid, or at least pretended to be. Listening to Western radio openly, in the presence of Prosecutor’s Office investigators, was a challenge to the system, one with which they could not be reconciled. Ira, meanwhile, at the demand to turn off the radio, stated that she was in her own home and she was going to listen to whatever radio she had a mind to. Tikhonov called for a police detail to take Ira to the precinct. The cops arrived. Yuri Fyodorovich and I said that after Ira they would have to take us away, too, for in that case we were going to behave exactly the same way. Tikhonov thought it over and decided it wasn’t worth it to take on a scandal like that. He dismissed the police detail.
The search ended at around ten at night. They left Yuri Fyodorovich a summons to the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office for the next day. Formally he’d been summoned as a witness in case no. 46012/18, which had been ongoing since 1976 and was known as the Chronicle of Current Events case.
As soon as the investigators and operatives left, a crowd of friends and Western correspondents surged into the apartment. Someone brought food and wine. Around the table we exchanged impressions and discussed further actions. We decided to hold a press conference the next day for Western journalists.
Meanwhile, the search at the Ginzburgs’ was ongoing. It didn’t end until around four in the morning. Hard currency really was planted on them. When the search began, Alik wasn’t home. He was on his way from Tarusa in order to be home by ten in the morning, as he and I had agreed. Arina was alone in the apartment with their two small children. The KGB men surged in and scattered throughout the apartment.
Investigator Borovik, who was conducting the search, opened the door to the toilet and blocked the doorway with his body so that no one could see what he was doing there. Then he opened the cabinet doors and “found” a green packet: 400 dollars. In the police record of the search, the cabinet was called a “hiding place.” After that, Borovik himself no longer searched but only took notes for the police record. He had completed his main assignment.
Half an hour after the search began, Alik Ginzburg and Yuri Mnyukh came into the apartment. No one else was allowed in after that. They would not give permission to go out for food. Friends would bring something for the children, set it outside the door, and leave. After that the investigator would open the door and give the inhabitants the food brought. Besides the planted hard currency and various documents, they confiscated from the Ginzburgs 4,700 rubles belonging to the Fund for the Aid of Political Prisoners (at the time on the black market about $1,200 USD) and 300 rubles of their own money kept separately. After the investigators left, there were 38 kopeks to live on left in the apartment.
The search at Lyudmila Alexeyeva’s ended the same day at seven in the evening. During the search, Lydia Voronina and Tolya Shcharansky came over and stayed until the end. When the search was finishing up, Voronina was presented with a search warrant for her home and taken away in a car. They wouldn’t let Shcharansky into the car no matter how hard he tried to get in. The search did not last long, until one in the morning. At that time, as if by coincidence, Volodya Slepak—a Jewish activist, a serious man but with a good sense of humor—looked in on Voronina. He arrived with a huge suitcase, so naturally they let him in right away. Investigator Pantyukhin, who was conducting the search, lunged rapaciously for the prey in anticipation of a great operational success and opened the suitcase. It was empty.
I spent the night with Orlov. He had a big day ahead. In the evening I phoned Petro Grigorievich Grigorenko, and we agreed not to delay any longer the announcement of the creation of the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, and the next day’s Helsinki Group press conference was the most advantageous moment for that announcement. It would be the Moscow Helsinki Group’s response to the repressions against it.
Our friends gradually dispersed, agreeing to meet here in the morning. Parked outside was a snow-plastered Volga with KGB men who had a long night on duty ahead of them here. Yuri Fyodorovich wrote a draft in his room for the Helsinki Group’s press release the next day. I put out the living room light, lay down on the sofa without undressing, and fell asleep instantly.
Between Prison and Freedom: Memoir of a Soviet Dissident by Alexander Podrabinek © 2025 by the University of Notre Dame. Excerpted with permission of the publisher.
