Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alexeyeva

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Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alexeyeva (2005)

Lyudmila Alexeyeva ( Russian Людмила Михайловна Алексеева ., Scientific transliteration Lyudmila Alekseeva Michajlovna *  20th July  1927 in Yevpatoria on the Crimea , † 8. December 2018 in Moscow ) was a Russian historian , human rights activist and Soviet dissident .

Alexejewa was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976 and, from its establishment in 2004, a member of the Human Rights Council of the Russian President .

Life

Soviet period

In her childhood, Lyudmila Alexeyeva's family moved to Moscow . She initially lived in the suburb of Ostankino in a simple hut until she was able to move to central Moscow in 1937. It was a poor family, but in the young Soviet Union their parents got the chance for a higher education: The father studied economics, the mother worked at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR after studying mathematics .

Lyudmila Alexejewa graduated from Moscow State University in 1950 from a degree in archeology and in 1956 from the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics. In 1952 she joined the CPSU .

From 1959 to 1968 Lyudmila Alexejewa worked as a science editor at Nauka- Verlag . During this time, Lyudmila Alexejewa was one of those dissidents who signed petitions for persecuted dissidents like Alexander Ginzburg and Juri Galanskow . In April 1968 she was expelled from the Communist Party and fired from the state-run Nauka publishing house.

From 1970 to 1977 she found a new job at the State Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the USSR, but turned disaffected with Soviet ideology and decided to forego a secure career as a scientist. During this time she became a human rights activist.

In the spring of 1976 Lyudmila Alexejewa was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group , which advocated compliance with the Helsinki Final Act by the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. In the final act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the states on both sides of the Iron Curtain committed, among other things, to respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. She became the editor and archivist of this human rights organization and her apartment was for a long time the unofficial office of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

emigration

In February 1977 Lyudmila Alexejewa was forced to leave the Soviet Union under threat of arrest. She moved to the USA , where she founded a kind of foreign office for the Moscow Helsinki Group and wrote regularly about the Soviet dissident movement.

In 1985 she published the first comprehensive monograph on the history of the Soviet dissidents, and in 1990 an autobiography on the Soviet dissident movement entitled The Thaw Generation .

Lyudmila Alexejewa also worked as a journalist for Radio Liberty and Voice of America .

Return to Russia

Lyudmila Alexeyeva (2014)

After the collapse of the Soviet Union , Lyudmila Alexejewa returned to Russia in 1993 and was elected chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1996 .

From 2004 she was a member of the newly formed Human Rights Council at the Russian President ..

In recent years she has been one of the sharpest critics of the government's human rights policy, particularly in the North Caucasus . From autumn 2009 Lyudmila Alexejewa headed the so-called Strategy 31 , an institutionalized peaceful street protest in memory of paragraph 31 of the constitution , which grants freedom of assembly and demonstration.

In 2012 she gave up her seat on the Human Rights Council in protest against its formation. In 2014 she sharply criticized the Russian annexation of Crimea . In 2015, after several requests, she became a member of the Human Rights Council again. At the end of October 2017, Alexejewa complained to the president of the "hysterical hatred" that Russian television wanted to spark against all (dissenters) and the rest of the world - unfortunately the formation of this atmosphere of hatred was still successful.

In the summer of 2018 she was visited for her birthday by President Putin, whom Alexejeva never concealed her dislike for.

She last lived in Moscow and died there on December 8, 2018. Alexejewa's last public words were written for the seventieth anniversary of the declaration of human rights , which she did not live to see for two days. In it, she deplored a civil society that is weak due to propaganda and manipulation, an equally weak legal culture and weak democratic institutions in Russia, as well as political cynicism and populism, which elsewhere too neglect the system of values ​​and institutions.

Honors

Web links

Commons : Lyudmila Michailovna Alexejewa  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lyudmila Alexejewa: Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights . Wesleyan University Press, 1977, ISBN 0-8195-6176-2 .
  2. ^ Lyudmila Alexejewa: The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era . University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8229-5911-9 .
  3. ^ Lyudmila Alexejewa is again a member of the Human Rights Council of the President of Russia Sputnik, May 18, 2015
  4. ^ Meeting of the Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights on October 30, 2017 on the website of the President of Russia
  5. ↑ Russia's conscience - civil rights activist Lyudmila Alexejewa has died , NZZ online, December 8, 2018
  6. ↑ Death report tass.ru, accessed on December 8, 2018
  7. ↑ "Uncompromisingly protecting victims and standing up for one another" , Novaya Gazeta, December 9, 2018
  8. ↑ 1000 PeaceWomen Worldwide. Lyudmila Alekseeva , accessed on: April 13, 2018 (German digital version of 1000 PeaceWomen Across the Globe , Series: Contrast Book, Verlag Scalo, Zurich 2005)
  9. ↑ Указ о присуждении премий за достижения в области правозащиты и благотворительности
personal data
SURNAME Alexejewa, Lyudmila Mikhailovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Алексеева, Людмила Михайловна (Russian spelling); Alekseeva, Lyudmila Michajlovna (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian historian, human rights activist and Soviet dissident
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Yevpatoria
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 2018
Place of death Moscow