Physicist Who Fought Soviet Regime Dies at 62

Leonid M. Ozernoy, a Russian physicist who fought the Soviet government for the freedom to leave the U.S.S.R. and teach at Harvard, died Feb. 28 in a Silver Spring, Md., hospital. He was 62.

According to his family, the resident of University Park, Md., died of complications related to cancer.

Colleagues remember Ozernoy as having a brilliant intellect that was unlike much of contemporary academia. Whereas most astrophysicists become highly specialized in their respective fields, Ozernoy’s reputation was for broad knowledge and wide-ranging research.

James M. Moran, Menzel professor of astrophysics at Harvard and a former colleague of Ozernoy, remembered him as a “stimulating person to have around” who offered “ideas at every turn.”

The son of a poet and an engineering professor, Ozernoy was born in Moscow on May 19, 1939. He received degrees in both physics and astronomy at Moscow University. And at Moscow’s prestigious Lebedev Physics Institute, where he later worked, he acquired a doctorate in physics and mathematics.

Stuart L. Shapiro ’69, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was among a select group of American scientists who went to the U.S.S.R. in the mid 1970s to meet Ozernoy and his colleagues.

He said Ozernoy was a “true product of the Soviet education system”—bright, innovative and industrious. Shapiro noted that Ozernoy’s move to America was “bittersweet.” Although Ozernoy badly wanted it, his emigration foreshadowed the ultimate disintegration of Russia as a great center of astrophysics—a fall that came about with the end of the Soviet Union.

Ozernoy’s groundbreaking work at Lebedev studying quasars, black holes and other astrological phenomena led Harvard to invite him to be a visiting professor in 1979.

But the Soviet Union forbade him to travel and added him to the list of refuseniks—Soviet Jews who could not obtain exit visas and were penalized for requesting them.

Following his request for an exit visa, Ozernoy lost his teaching position at Moscow University and the government prohibited him from publishing his research. His wife was also fired from her job.

But Ozernoy refused to accept the government’s decision. He organized hunger strikes and demonstrations and wrote a letter of protest to the International Astronomical Union conference in Greece in 1982.

As a result of these efforts, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’54-’56 (D.-Mass.) intervened on his behalf. Kennedy met with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1986 and pushed for Ozernoy’s release.

Seven months later, Ozernoy was granted permission to leave the Soviet Union and take up his position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

After his time at Harvard, Ozernoy worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In 1993 he became a professor of physics and computational sciences at George Mason University in Virginia.

Through the years, Ozernoy produced some of the earliest papers on quasars and influential work concerning the formation of black holes, magnetic stars and pulsars, cosmic radio sources and the evolution of cosmological turbulence.

He continued his work until his death—as recently as January he presented a paper to the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.

Ozernoy is survived by his wife, Marianne, and their two daughters, Ilana Ozernoy and Alisa Ozernoy Kuperman.