Grigory Pomerants

In 2009, The Bjørnson Prize of the Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression was awarded to Pomerants and Mirkina "for their extensive contribution to strengthening the freedom of expression in Russia."

Pomerants' lectures and a rejected thesis on Zen Buddhism were studied by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and composer Eduard Artemyev during their work on Stalker. Pomerants also appears in the 2008 documentary Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky.

Pomerants' political and social articles as well as his public conduct attracted the attention of the KGB. On November 14, 1984, Pomerants was officially warned in connection with his publications abroad. On May 26, 1985, KGB agents searched his flat and confiscated his literary archive.

In addition to official articles, which focused on the spiritual traditions of India and China, Pomerants began to write essays on historical and social topics. While his works were soon stopped from being printed in the Soviet Union, they were widely published in samizdat. They were also reprinted in the western émigré magazines Kontinent, Sintaksis and Strana i Mir, and a collection of essays under the title Neopublikovannoe (Unpublished Works) was published in 1972 in Frankfurt.

Andrei Sakharov, who had met Pomerants in an informal seminar at Valentin Turchin's flat in 1970, describes his interests as follows:

On December 3, 1965, Pomerants gave a lecture at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow publicly denouncing Stalinism. It caused a sensation and became one of the early pieces of samizdat literature. In 1968, he co-signed a petition in support of the participants of the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the introduction of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. He also put his signature to Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov's "Appeal to the World Public Opinion" in protest of Trial of the Four. As a result, he was deprived of any opportunity to defend his thesis on Zen Buddhism at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies.

Under the impression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the persecution of Boris Pasternak, Pomerants became active as a dissident. In 1959–1960, he led semi-secret seminars on philosophical, historical, political and economic issues. During this time he established contact with dissidents such as Vladimir Osipov and the editors and contributors of the dissident magazine Sintaksis Alexander Ginzburg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Yuri Galanskov. He also became close to the painters of the underground Lianozovo group.

In 1946, he was expelled from the Communist Party for "anti-Party statements". Three years later he was arrested and sentenced to five years' imprisonment for anti-Soviet agitation. After Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, he was released due to a general amnesty. He did not rejoin the Party, which prohibited him from teaching at tertiary level. He was also denied Moscow residence. From 1953 to 1956, Pomerants worked as a village school teacher in the Donets Basin and later, upon his return to Moscow, as a bibliographer in the Fundamental Library of Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Grigory Solomonovich Pomerants (also: Grigorii or Grigori, Russian: Григо́рий Соломо́нович Помера́нц, 13 March 1918, Vilnius – 16 February 2013, Moscow) was a Russian philosopher and cultural theorist. He is the author of numerous philosophical works that circulated in samizdat and made an impact on the liberal intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Grigory Pomerants was born in 1918 to a Polish Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania. His family moved to Moscow in 1925. Pomerants graduated in Russian language and literature from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History [ru] (IFLI, MIFLI). His thesis on Fyodor Dostoyevsky was condemned as "anti-Marxist" and as a result he was barred from admission to post-graduate studies in 1939. He went on to lecture at the Tula Pedagogical Institute in 1940.