Tengiz Gudava
Tengiz Gudava was a Georgian author and human rights activist who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1987 and worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for 17 years. He died in Prague in 2009 under ill-defined circumstances.
Background
Born in Samtredia, Soviet Georgia to a Georgian father and a Russian mother, Gudava graduated from the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute with a degree in biophysics. Tengiz Gudava, and his brother Eduard, engaged in dissident movement. They formed a rock band "Phantom" which organized unsanctioned concerts to attract the public attention to human rights issues, published in samizdat, and participated in the Georgian Helsinki Group, formed by young Georgian dissidents in the 1970s to monitor the Helsinki Accords.In 1982, Tengiz Gudava was arrested by the Soviet authorities; he was held in investigative detention for 1 year, then sentenced to 7 years imprisonment and 3 years in exile for "anti-Soviet activities". His brother Eduard publicly protested his arrest in November 1985, and was himself sentenced to up to 4 years imprisonment. Having served 5 years in a labor camp, the Gudava brothers were released in 1987 on condition of that they would leave the Soviet Union. Tengiz Gudava went to the United States where he would eventually become a naturalized United States citizen.
In 1987, he moved to Europe, and worked for what were then the Georgian and Russian services of the RFE/RL in Munich, and later, in Prague. Earlier in his career, Gudava was a close associate of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a fellow Georgian dissident and the future first democratically elected President of Georgia. However Gudava eventually broke with Gamsakhurdia over the latter's nationalist rhetoric.
In Europe he collaborated with the Soviet dissidents such as Vladimir Bukovsky and Yuri Yarim-Agaev in their émigré NGOs and regularly published on political, economic, and cultural problems in the Soviet Union and then CIS counties, especially Central Asia and Caucasia.
In 2004, together with Serge Iourienen and Mario Corti, left RFE/RL in protest to what they believed was an increasingly conformist line of the Russian service. He then worked as an independent journalist.