'Wise and humane': Soviet dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva dies aged 91
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a
Soviet-era dissident who became a symbol of resistance in modern-day Russia, has died at the age
of 91 after a long illness. In a career emblematic
of the country’s turbulent history, she defended human rights in the Soviet
Union from the 1950s, and continued to do so in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mikhail Fedotov, head
of the Kremlin Human Rights Council, said Alexeyeva died on Saturday in a
Moscow hospital. “This is a huge loss
for the entire human rights movement in Russia,” Fedotov said. “She had been
struggling with illness recently, but her mind was always stronger than her
body and far stronger than any disease.” Alexeyeva had been the
chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, one of Russia’s oldest human rights
organisations, which she helped found in 1976. The group lamented the loss of a
“legendary, wise and humane person who remained a defender of human rights until
the last moments of her life”.
Alexeyeva trained as
an archaeologist and in the late 1950s, her apartment became a meeting place
for the Soviet dissident intelligentsia, and a point for storing and
distributing banned publications.
She campaigned against
trials for dissidents, losing her job as a science publisher and enduring
numerous searches and interrogations by the KGB. With her security under
threat, she left the USSR in 1977 for the United States. Alexeyeva returned to
Russia in 1993 after the Soviet Union collapsed, and became a strong critic of
Putin.
She criticised
Moscow’s seizure of the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 for “bringing
shame on my country”. The following year, she denounced the “awful political
killing” of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. She also tried to shed
light on the fate of accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after
accusing Russian officials of tax fraud, and denounced the imprisonment of
anti-Kremlin tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Kremlin spokesman
Dmitry Peskov said Putin had sent a message of condolences to her family. The
president “greatly appreciates Lyudmila Alexeyeva’s contribution to the
development of civil society in Russia and had great respect for her point of
view on several issues concerning the life of the country”, Peskov said. In 2009, the European
parliament awarded Alexeyeva the prestigious Sakharov prize for defenders of
human thought, along with the Memorial human rights group. “If I save even one
person, it’s already a true joy,” she said at the time.
