During the Cold War, Lord Pearson became famous as a leading critic of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and by his support for Soviet dissidents.
A few cultural figures managed to escape from the Soviet regime, such as Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lyudmila Makarova, Mikhail Shemyakin, William Brui, and others.
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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.
Widow of Andrei Sakharov Elena Bonner compared Stomakhin with Soviet dissidents who were prosecuted for their writings by Yuri Andropov.
In 1998, he founded The Gratitude Fund in order to commemorate the Soviet dissidents "who waged a war against Soviet power and sacrificed their personal freedom and their lives for democracy".
Communist Pravda reacted by publishing a letter of three renowned Soviet dissidents – Andrey Sinyavsky, Vladimir Maksimov and Pyotr Abovin-Yegides – calling for Boris Yeltsin's immediate resignation.
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.