The Final Act

When the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Agreements on human rights in 1975, physicist Yuri Orlov, Anatoly Shcharansky, Yelena Bonner and Aleksandr Ginzburg formed a group whose declared purpose was to monitor the U.S.S.R.'s compliance with the accord. Playing cat-and-mouse with the authorities even as they were being infiltrated by Kremlin moles, this gutsy band of intellectuals was soon catapulted into the arena of superpower politics.