Pioneer for human rights in Russia
MOSCOW — Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a human rights pioneer and dissident who challenged the Soviet and Russian regimes for decades, demanding that they free political prisoners and establish democratic rights, died Saturday in a Moscow hospital, a Russian official said. She was 91.
“She remained a human rights activist to the very end,” said Mikhail Fedotov, head of Russia’s Human Rights Council. “This is a loss for the entire human rights movement in Russia.”
The gentle but courageous activist was born under dictator Josef Stalin’s regime. She risked her own freedom to protest the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s and co-founded the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia’s oldest human rights organization, in 1976.
Alexeyeva faced death threats throughout her career and was forced into exile by Soviet authorities in 1977.
She returned to Russia in 1993 after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and continued her work energetically, but suspicion of non-governmental organizations under President Vladimir Putin’s rule increasingly impeded her activities.
In 2014, she announced that the Moscow Helsinki Group had laid off most of its staff and cut pay for the remainder. The move followed declining foreign donations in the wake of legislation requiring groups receiving such funding to register as “foreign agents.”
Alexeyeva relentlessly pressed Soviet authorities to improve human rights, through times of crushing repression and those of relative tolerance, a job that required enormous patience.
“In Soviet times, we couldn’t do anything to defend human rights,” she told The Associated Press in a 2009 interview. “We couldn’t even defend ourselves. Our activity was confined to proclaiming that the state should respect human rights and defend them.”
After the Soviet collapse, she turned into a respectful but insistent voice urging that Russia’s newly elected leadership live up to its rhetoric about democracy and the rule of law.
Despite Putin’s early patronage, including his naming her to an advisory council, Alexeyeva was a leading critic of Russia’s second war in Chechnya, launched in 1999 during Putin’s first term as prime minister, and of Putin’s weakening of Russia’s democratic institutions.
Government officials later accused nongovernment organizations like the Moscow Helsinki Group of spying on Russia for the West, and Alexeyeva became the target of death threats by nationalist groups. Still, she remained determined and optimistic, maintaining her ties to the Kremlin.
“I don’t accuse, I explain,” she said. “I say, ‘You don’t agree? We will speak some more.’”
While she was certain that Russia would one day embrace Western-style democracy, she did not expect that it would happen soon.
“I won’t live to see Russia become a democratic state with the rule of law,” she told the AP.
In December 2008, Putin proposed legislation that would have significantly broadened the definition of treason. Rights activists said the law would make anyone critical of the government liable to prosecution as an enemy of the state. After an outcry by Alexeyeva and others, the proposal was withdrawn.
But Alexeyeva and her allies lost at least as many battles as they won.
After the December 2003 parliamentary election — a watershed vote that saw most of Russia’s liberal opposition leadership driven from parliament — Alexeyeva recalled bluntly telling Putin: “We don’t have elections anymore, because the results are decided by the bosses and not the people.”