Leading Russian dissident, Putin critic
Jailed for 7 years in Soviet labour camps
MOSCOW • Sergei Kovalyov, a leading Russian dissident and human rights activist who fought for the victims of oppression in Soviet times and opposed Moscow’s war against Chechen separatists in the 1990s, died Monday in Moscow. He was 91.
Kovalyov was a tireless advocate for Russian democracy and a bitter critic of President Vladimir Putin and his moves to curb rights groups, freedom of speech and the right to protest.
His death was confirmed by Memorial, the human rights organization he helped found, and by his son, Ivan Kovalyov, who said on social media that his father died at home in his sleep. The cause of his death was not announced, but he had been in poor health in his final years.
Memorial called Kovalyov’s death “an irreparable loss.” The organization has been under severe pressure from Russian authorities after being declared a foreign agent in 2016.
One of Russia’s most influential dissidents, Kovalyov and nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov wrote an open letter in December 1974 calling for an amnesty for all Soviet political prisoners. Kovalyov was arrested and later convicted of anti-soviet agitation and propaganda.
He was jailed for seven years in Soviet labour camps in the Perm and Tartarstan regions, followed by three years of exile in Kolyma in Russia’s Far East. He was not allowed to return to his home city of Moscow until 1986 after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reformist policies of perestroika and glasnost.
Kovalyov, who won numerous global human rights awards, was close to Sakharov, the leading Soviet dissident, and was part of a group of pioneering Soviet activists who secretly published underground materials known as samizdat, opposing the official Communist Party line and exposing abuses. He defended imprisoned Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other jailed writers and activists.
Kovalyov graduated as a biophysicist from Moscow State University in 1954, publishing dozens of scientific papers. Outraged by the political show trials of writers in the 1960s, he joined a group of rights activists and dissidents and was expelled from Moscow State University in 1969 because of his political activities.