Clarke peppered the novel with names of various Soviet dissidents, including physicists Andrei Sakharov and Yuri Orlov, human-rights activists Mykola Rudenko and Anatoly Marchenko, Russian Orthodox activist Gleb Yakunin, among others.
He personally supervised all Soviet dissident cases including Sergei Kovalyov, Gleb Yakunin, Alexei Smirnov, and Yuri Orlov.
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As a deputy head of the investigation department of the Moscow branch of the Soviet KGB secret service, Trofimov supervised all cases of dissidents including Sergei Kovalyov, Gleb Yakunin, Alexei Smirnov, and Yuri Orlov.
Tarusa became the home place for such famous dissident figures as Anatoly Marchenko, Larisa Bogoraz, Gleb Yakunin, Pavel Litvinov, Alexander Ginzburg, Andrey Amalrik, Sergei Kovalev, Zoya Krakhmalnikova, Lev Kopelev, and Frida Vigdorova.
The Orthodox priests Gleb Yakunin, Sergiy Zheludkov and others spent years in Soviet prisons and exile for their efforts in defending freedom of worship.
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Gleb Yakunin, a critic of the Moscow Patriarchate who was one of those who briefly gained access to the KGB archive documents in the early 1990s, argued that the Moscow Patriarchate was "practically a subsidiary, a sister company of the KGB".