Academic who played a major role in highlighting the repression of dissidents in the Soviet Union and in the founding of Index on Censorship

No one outside Russia did more to publicise the plight of Soviet human rights activists and political protesters than Peter Reddaway, a British American academic, who has died aged 84. Known as dissidents and numbering only in dozens, they played a major role in highlighting the repression of independent thinkers in the Soviet Union. Reddaway was one of their first foreign champions. Thanks to his position as a Washington-based expert on Soviet studies, he frequently gave evidence to US congressional committees and helped to make the issue of dissidents a key element on the agenda of east-west dialogue during the cold war.

Although the terror of Stalin’s murderous rule had been lifted under his successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, one chilling new practice became common: the misuse of psychiatry to send dissidents to closed mental hospitals. Reddaway and Sidney Bloch, an Australian medical colleague, campaigned to have the Soviet Union expelled from the World Psychiatric Association. The Soviet Union resigned in 1983 before they were thrown out.