Leading Russian dissident and Putin critic Sergei Kovalyov dies at 91

Yuri Kadobnov AFP/Getty Images Russian human rights advocate and dissident Sergei Kovalyov speaks with a journalist at his home in Moscow on Jan. 20, 2005. Kovalev has died at 91, his family said on Aug. 9, 2021.

MOSCOW â€" 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 labor 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.

He was one of 15 dissidents who founded an organization in May 1969 called the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the U.S.S.R., which exposed political trials and rights abuses against Soviet political prisoners jailed for dissent.

The group wrote a public letter to the United Nations in 1969 appealing for a global investigation of the political trials and imprisonment of activists in the Soviet Union.

In the late 1980s, as Gorbachev introduced the limited political freedoms of the late Soviet era, Kovalyov played a key role in the formation of Memorial, becoming co-chairman.

In June 1988, Sakharov and Kovalyov spoke at Memorial’s first officially sanctioned rally, dedicated to the victims of Soviet political terror and attended by several hundred people. The group decided to form an archive, museum and library to memorialize those who were imprisoned or died in the Soviet gulag, a system of brutal prison camps. Memorial was registered in 1990.

Kovalyov became a people’s deputy in the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990, and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was elected to the State Duma. He helped to write Article 2 of the Russian constitution, setting out fundamental human rights and political freedoms.

As Russia’s first human rights ombudsman, he soon found new causes: When then-President Boris Yeltsin sent troops to quell a separatist rebellion in Chechnya in 1994, Kovalyov, a presidential adviser on human rights, traveled there and reported on atrocities against civilians.

He was stripped of his post as ombudsman by the State Duma in March 1995 because of his outspoken criticism of the war. Kovalyov’s campaigning and media coverage of Russian army losses in Chechnya ignited public opposition to the war.

“The Russian military treated Chechnya as if it was a conquered country and Chechens as if they were enemies of Russia,” Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, wrote in a 2019 column for the Moscow Times, marking the war’s 25th anniversary. “I shall never forget the horrors I saw in Grozny in February 1995: fresh evidence of atrocities by Russian troops against the civilian population and comprehensive looting by soldiers of a city that was supposed to be part of their own country.”

Western leaders who took a soft line on Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya only undermined liberals like Kovalyov, “who opposed the war and saw it as a threat to Russia’s hopes of being a democracy,” de Waal said.

In June 1995, when Chechen rebels seized 1,600 hostages in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, Kovalyov helped negotiate their release, offering himself as a hostage instead.

He resigned in 1996 as head of Yeltsin’s human rights commission, accusing Yeltsin of betraying the country’s nascent democratic principles.

“I can no longer work with a president who I believe is not a supporter of democracy or a guarantor of rights and civic freedoms in my country,” Kovalyov wrote.

In 2002, he set up a group to try to investigate several suspicious 1999 apartment bombings that paved the way for Russian authorities to relaunch the war against Chechen separatists. But he was stymied when two colleagues involved in the project died. One, Sergei Yushenkov, was gunned down, and the second, journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, died mysteriously in what allies believed was a poisoning.

Kovalyov eschewed patriotism, nationalism and militarism, saying he preferred to stand up for universal human rights. A strong critic of Putin, he opposed Russia’s 2008 military intervention in neighboring Georgia and its 2014 annexation of Crimea.

In 2010, he signed an online letter entitled “Putin Must Go,” which accused the Russian leader of destroying Russia. It has since collected more than 153,000 signatures.

“We argue that no substantive reform is possible in Russia today as long as Putin has real power in the country,” the letter said. It accused Putin’s circle “of contempt not only of the rights and freedoms of the individual, but also of human life itself.”

In 2015, he penned another open appeal, saying that Russia’s “immorality and political barbarism” were a threat to the world. He added that Russian totalitarian tendencies were fraught with catastrophic global consequences and warned countries against relying on Russia for gas and oil.

“No one knows how to deal with this challenge, but many people realize that not to face it is shameful and dangerous,” Kovalyov wrote.

“It is true that we do not know how to make universal values enforceable, not just empty slogans, but we should at least know what simply must not be done,” he said. “You cannot appease an aggressor. You must not buy your safety, especially your natural-gas supply, with other people’s lives and fates.”

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