Activist was exiled and threatened but kept fighting for Russian human rights
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who has died aged 91, was the grand dame of Russia’s human rights movement. She was targeted by death threats, accused of spying for the West, interrogated by the KGB and forced into exile for 16 years. She was still marching on the streets of Moscow in her 80s.
At just over 5ft (about 1.52 metres) tall, Alexeyeva was a diminutive yet forceful opponent of the Kremlin for half a century, nimbly shifting from the clandestine samizdat of the Soviet era to blog posts in the digital age. Raised amid the terror of Stalin’s purges, when some of her neighbours were arrested and whisked away by the secret police, she came of age as a dissident in the late 1960s, spurred by the arrest of writers and other intellectuals under Leonid
Brezhnev.
As a typist for the Chronicle of Current Events, an underground periodical that reported on human rights violations, she was sometimes called into KGB headquarters for questioning, and once stuffed eight copies of the Chronicle into her bra to avoid the prying eyes of interrogators.
On her way to be interviewed by the secret police, the New York Times reported in 2010, she would buy a ham sandwich, an eclair and an orange – luxuries in the 1970s Soviet Union. ‘‘They reacted very nervously when they started to smell ham,’’ she said. ‘‘Then I would start eating the orange, and the aroma would start dissipating through the room.
‘‘That’s how I amused myself. It was a way to play on his nerves.’’
Alexeyeva was perhaps best known as a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, often described as Russia’s oldest human rights organisation. Initially led by physicist Yuri Orlov, the group was formed in May 1976, nine months after the Helsinki Accords were signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and 33 other countries.
The accords featured a section noting that ‘‘the participating states will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’’. Alexeyeva, along with Orlov and the group’s nine other founding members, set about ensuring that, when the Soviet Union fell short of its promises on human rights, the rest of the world would hear about it.
The group smuggled 195 reports out of the country, including a document cataloguing abuses against a group of teenage boys who refused to slander a Catholic dissident.
Not surprisingly, it also earned the ire of the Kremlin, which sent members of the Moscow Helsinki Group to prison, to labour camps or, in the case of Alexeyeva, to exile abroad. She worked in the US, writing books and testifying to institutions including human rights activist b July 20, 1927 d December 8, 2018 Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz Congress and the State Department before returning to Russia in 1993, less than two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She helped resurrect the Moscow Helsinki Group, which reasserted itself as a human rights watchdog under Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who was elected president in 2000. While she served on his human rights advisory council, she became a fierce critic of his handling of the Second Chechen War, as well as his government’s stifling of dissent and political opposition.
After the 2003 parliamentary elections, in which Putin allies swept liberal lawmakers out of office, Alexeyeva said she told Putin: ‘‘We don’t have elections any more, because the results are decided by the bosses and not the people.’’ Yet she remained guardedly optimistic. ‘‘Repression makes you stronger,’’ she said in 2012. ‘‘We lived through Soviet power, and we will live through this power.’’
Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alexeyeva was born in Yevpatoria, a Black Sea port town in Crimea. Her father was an economist who was killed in World War II, and her mother was a mathematician; the family moved to Moscow when she was 4.
After studying archaeology and history at Moscow State University, she taught high school history in Moscow before serving as an editor at Nauka, a scientific publishing house. After signing a letter in defence of two writers convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda in 1968, she lost her job and was expelled from the Communist Party.
In recent years, she watched aghast as colleagues such as Stanislav Markelov, a 34-year-old human rights lawyer, were shot and killed in Moscow. But she said such attacks had little impact on her work.
‘‘I don’t know of a single person who works with me who would stop doing what they are doing because of threats,’’ she said in 2009, after the killings of Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. ‘‘If I stopped what I am doing now, life wouldn’t be interesting to me.’’
Her marriage to Valentin Alexeyev ended in divorce. She later married Nikolai Williams, a mathematician. Survivors include two sons from her first marriage; five grandchildren; and three greatgrandchildren. –
‘‘Repression makes you stronger. We lived through Soviet power, and we will live through this power.’’