Lyudmila Alekseeva - biography. Why there won’t be a human rights activist of Lyudmila Alekseeva’s caliber in Russia for many years

Human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva died in Moscow on Saturday at the age of 91. This was reported on the website of the Russian Presidential Development Council civil society and Human Rights (HRC).

“Today in Moscow, at the age of 92, the oldest Russian human rights activist, Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alekseeva, a member of the Presidential Council, died Russian Federation for the development of civil society and human rights, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group,” the message says.

Information about Alekseeva’s death also appeared on the HRC website. “Today in Moscow, at the age of 92, the oldest Russian human rights activist, Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alekseeva, a member of the Presidential Council of the Russian Federation for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, and head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, died,” the statement said.

“To say we will miss her is an understatement. This is a terrible loss for the entire human rights movement in Russia,” said the head of the Human Rights Council, Mikhail Fedotov, whose words are quoted on the website.

About Lyudmila Alekseeva
Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alekseeva was born on July 20, 1927. In 1950 she graduated from the history department of Moscow State University. She worked as a history teacher at a vocational school in Moscow, and as a scientific editor for the archeology and ethnography editorial office at the Nauka publishing house. In 1970-1977 she was an employee of the Institute of Scientific Information on social sciences Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Alekseeva became involved in human rights activities in 1966, participating in a protest against the arrest and conviction in the USSR of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuliy Daniel, who published their books abroad, bypassing censorship.

She became one of the initiators of providing financial assistance to political prisoners and their families. She participated in the publication of the first illegal human rights bulletin in the USSR, “Chronicle of Current Events.”
In 1974, Alekseeva was warned by decree of the Presidium Supreme Council USSR for “the systematic production and distribution of anti-Soviet works.” In February 1977 she was forced to emigrate from Soviet Union, settled in the United States. Author of the series scientific works on the history of the dissident movement in the USSR.

Alekseeva returned to Russia in 1993, and in 1996 she headed the restored oldest human rights organization, the Moscow Helsinki Group. In 2002, she was included in the Commission on Human Rights under the President of Russia, which in 2004 was transformed into the HRC.

In 2007, Alekseeva was awarded the French Order of the Legion of Honor, in 2009 - the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit Federal Republic Germany". In December 2017, she became a laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation for achievements in human rights activities.

MOSCOW, December 8 – RIA Novosti. Soviet dissident, head of one of the oldest human rights organizations in Russia, Lyudmila Alekseeva, died at the age of 92. She was perhaps the most authoritative person in human rights circles: for some, officially - Lyudmila Mikhailovna, but among themselves, many human rights activists simply called her - "Baba Luda"

In her youth, Alekseeva shared communist views and was even a member of the CPSU for some time, but then left the party. During the Khrushchev Thaw, her apartment became a storage place for samizdat, meetings of dissidents and representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia.

Her human rights colleagues speak of her as a selfless, constantly and hard-working person who, while showing flexibility, never betrays her ideals. Meanwhile, Alekseeva, respected in human rights circles, has often been criticized because foreign funding MHG and her own American citizenship. She, like many human rights activists, has more than once become the object of being labeled as a “State Department agent” or a “fifth column.” But she was a human rights activist – one of the “patriarchs” of human rights protection in Russia.

She stood up for many and did not hesitate to make a request to the president. At one time she asked him to pardon the man sentenced to life sentence ex-senator Igor Izmestyev, she also offered to take under the patronage charitable foundation tragically deceased Elizabeth Glinka - Doctor Lisa. The head of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, Mikhail Fedotov, often recalled one of her phrases - “chicken grain by grain” - this is how she acted, slowly, but systematically moving towards the goal, she taught this to others. She also taught compassion.

During the recent rotation in the Presidential Human Rights Council, Alekseeva again became a member of it. Last year Alekseeva became a laureate state prize for outstanding achievements in the field of human rights activities. She donated the monetary portion of the award to the needs of her organization. “I will give the prize to my group, like all my prizes, since I am being awarded not as Grandma Lyuda, but as the chairman of the famous Moscow Helsinki Group,” she said then.

Alekseeva was born in 1927 in Yevpatoria, a seaside resort town in western Crimea. The family moved to Moscow when Lyudmila was a child. Alekseeva’s parents shared communist views, apparently, which is why the future human rights activist from childhood was sure that she lived in the freest and fairest country, and grew up as an absolutely “Soviet” child. Meanwhile, before her eyes, the Stalin's repressions- many of her father’s colleagues in the Central Union were subjected to them. He himself also came under investigation, but was not repressed.

During the war, Alekseeva tried more than once to get to the front. In Izhevsk, where she came to visit her mother after evacuation to Northern Kazakhstan, she took nursing courses, but, being a minor, did not go to the front. Upon returning to Moscow in 1943, Alekseeva did not go to school, but again tried to get to the front or to a defense enterprise. Then she was sent to the construction of the Stalinskaya metro station (later renamed Semyonovskaya). What she saw during the war years largely determined her life and partly pushed her into human rights activities. As Alekseeva herself recalled, many factories were evacuated to small Izhevsk, but not a single square meter of housing was built for the people who arrived there. But, despite everything - she saw it - people helped each other. According to the human rights activist, it is respect for the feat Soviet people during the war, she was inspired by the desire to make sure that her fellow citizens lived better, and that the authorities respected their rights and human dignity. People who survived war and emerged victorious deserved to be treated as human beings—a belief that played a huge role in her subsequent human rights work.

Party member

In 1945, Alekseeva entered the history department of Moscow State University. Years of study greatly influenced her views. According to Alekseeva’s recollections, many student functionaries and Komsomol members during their years of study at the history department built their future career party leaders, they often initiated “personal cases” against fellow students for any minor “misdemeanors.” Perhaps this was the first time Alekseeva began to doubt the CPSU - it seemed to her that the party had been infiltrated by people devoid of moral principles and striving for power.

After Moscow State University and graduate school at the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics, Alekseeva began teaching history at a vocational school in Moscow and was a freelance lecturer for the Komsomol (Komsomol). In 1952, Alekseeva joined the CPSU, but soon her views changed, she became disillusioned with the party, abandoned her PhD in the history of the CPSU and abandoned her scientific career. AND Khrushchev's thaw- the time of the birth of the human rights (dissident, as it was called in the USSR) movement - was marked by a turning point in its own life– she found herself in the ranks of human rights activists, fighters, and Soviet dissidents. Then her apartment became a meeting place for Moscow intellectuals and dissidents and a “handicraft printing house” - a place for storing and reproducing samizdat, which, according to her, was the quintessence of artistic, political, and social thought of that time and previous times.

Dissident

Her first human rights activities began ten years before the creation of the MHG. In 1966, she, along with other dissidents, spoke out in defense of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who were tried for publishing their works abroad - bypassing Soviet censorship. At the end of the decade she took part in speeches in connection with political process in relation to samizdat activists - journalist Alexander Ginzburg and poet Yuri Galanskov, who were accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. Then Alekseeva took up the topic of political prisoners and became one of the initiators of providing material assistance to them and their families.

This ends for her with expulsion from the party and dismissal from her job in 1968. But her human rights activities do not end there: she signs documents for the dissident movement and becomes a typist for the first human rights bulletin in the USSR - the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events. The first “Chronicle” was printed on Alekseeva’s typewriter – an old, heavy “Underwood” from the 1920s. At this time, the human rights activist met perhaps the most famous Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov.

But along with this, systematic searches and interrogations came into her life. One day in 1974, Alekseeva was called to the Lubyanka and told - as a preventive measure - that a case was prepared against her under Article 70 (anti-Soviet agitation or propaganda), and if she continued her activities, she would immediately be brought to justice.

In 1976, Alekseeva joined the newly created MHG, became the editor and custodian of the organization’s documents, and her apartment became a kind of office for the group. The oldest existing human rights organization in Russia, the Group for Assistance to the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR (MHG) was created to collect and publish information on violations of the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Accords. IN MHG Alekseeva worked side by side with Yuri Orlov, Mikhail Bernshtam, Elena Bonner, Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoly Marchenko, Vitaly Rubin, Anatoly Sharansky.

Emigrant

In 1977, during another search of the apartment, samizdat and foreign human rights literature were confiscated. Under threat of arrest, she was forced to emigrate and settled in the United States, where she became a foreign representative of the MHG. Over time, she received American citizenship, and returned to her homeland only in 1993 - but not to the Soviets, but to Russia. During the years of emigration, she prepared the publication of MHG documents and hosted programs on Radio Liberty and Voice of America. In the USA, she published her memoirs “The Thaw Generation” and the monograph “The History of Dissent in the USSR. Recent period", which was initially planned as a reference book on the dissident movement in the USSR, but in the end the work grew into a real study. So Alekseeva became the first Russian researcher of the dissident movement of the USSR; this work still remains the most complete and comprehensive study on this topic. In 1980- In the 1960s, as part of the US delegation, she took part in OSCE conferences (Reykjavik, Paris).

Head of the revived MHG

Returning to Russia, she headed the MHG in 1996. Alekseeva herself said that she hesitated when she was offered to head the MHG, but in the end she decided to test herself as a “boss.” As the leader of the movement “For Human Rights” Lev Ponomarev recalled, he and Alekseeva jointly took up the revival of the organization - group for a long time didn’t gather, people left, the organization bore the name MHG, but didn’t really work. According to him, the human rights activist returned to Russia deliberately - she wanted to build democracy here - and it was she who became the engine for the restoration of the MHG. She had her own office, but more often she worked at home. According to Ponomarev, Alekseev is an example of devotion, “exorbitant,” as he put it in one of his interviews, devotion to his work; she often neglects her health and devotes all her time to work. For many human rights activists, she has become a standard, a moral authority. Everyone talks about her dedication to her cause - she devoted her whole life to protecting human rights. And her qualities helped in this - activity, inflexibility and at the same time compassion for people and a desire to help. Lev Ponomarev notes in her a combination of a sober, practical mind and dedication to the human rights cause: according to him, she manages to interact with the authorities and maintain her human rights face. After the law came into force foreign agents", MHG refused foreign funding and turned to Russian citizens for support.

Russian human rights activist

For ten years, Alekseeva was a member of the Human Rights Commission under the President of the Russian Federation, later transformed into the Presidential Human Rights Council (HRC), but left it due to disagreement with the new procedure for forming the council. She participated in the preparation of large-scale events related to the consolidation of civil society in Russia: she was one of the organizers and three co-chairs of the All-Russian Civil Congress, and joined the organizing committee of the Civil Forum, held in 2013 on the initiative of the committee of civil initiatives of ex-Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation Alexei Kudrin. Since 2009, Alekseeva has hosted Active participation in speeches of citizens on the 31st day of each month on Triumfalnaya Square in defense of Article 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation on freedom of assembly - “Strategy-31”. During the next action, she was detained by riot police and taken to the police station. This incident caused a huge resonance both in Russia and abroad.

She received threats from nationalists, she was accused of serving US interests, she had eggs thrown at her at a press conference in defense of prisoners, her photograph was used in an offensive installation with the inscription “you are not welcome here” on youth forum"Seliger". She was nominated twice Nobel Prize world, was in the top ten influential women Russia, she was awarded the most famous human rights awards and prizes.

The other day, Lyudmila Alekseeva, the main human rights activist of the Russian land, died. She was 91 years old.

All of us treated her with great respect. We can say that she was considered the last conscience of the nation after the death of Dmitry Likhachev.

We can’t live without the conscience of the nation, right?

Alekseeva once had many competitors in this noble field, but she outlasted them all. In the 60s, 70s, 80s, no one knew her - but now they forget those whom they knew before. They say correctly that you have to live in Russia for a long time.

Alekseeva has been involved in human rights throughout her life.

We are accustomed to this word, but what kind of profession is this? Where do they teach it, how much do they pay for it?

I’m kidding, of course - they don’t teach it anywhere, and officially there is no such work. Human rights activist is a calling. Again, it is difficult to find a match. Most likely this is someone like a saint or blessed. It’s also not work, but everyone knows and respects such people. And they feed on whatever God sends - or what good people give.

I have never been interested in Alekseeva’s biography, but now I wanted to get acquainted.

“Lyudmila Alekseeva (nee Slavinskaya) was born on July 20, 1927 in Yevpatoriya in the family of Mikhail Lvovich Slavinsky and Valentina Afanasyevna Efimenko. Mother was a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences and a teacher at the Moscow Higher Technical School named after Bauman, and is the author of several textbooks on higher mathematics…

WITH early childhood Lyudmila’s family settled in Moscow, at first they lived in a barracks in Ostankino, and in 1937 they moved to the center of Moscow into a communal apartment, which was vacated after the arrest of one of the responsible employees of the Centrosoyuz, the department in which Mikhail Slavinsky worked...

Lyudmila's father came under investigation, but escaped reprisals. In total, according to the memoirs of Lyudmila Alekseeva, 297 colleagues of M.L. Slavinsky were sent to camps or destroyed..."

What a horror! How did dad escape repression? Why did 297 of his colleagues sit down, but he didn’t? Why did dad get housing in the center of Moscow? On this score, there is a big gap in the biography of the most revered Russian human rights activist and anti-Soviet activist...

The following is the story of the family's life during the war. She was taken to Kazakhstan for evacuation, then returned to Moscow again. Lyudmila worked at Metrostroy out of conscientiousness. Wikipedia describes this very dramatically: “I was dragging trolleys with rock from the tunnel. The work was grueling, but the girl perceived it as a requirement of the time.”

Well, my mother-in-law, the same age as Alekseeva, also lived in Moscow at that time. True, her father was just subjected to repression, having been moved from a bright room to a kennel under the stairs (and the room went to an informer who reported on the head of the family - that he said something stupid about giving money to Spanish children: they say his own people have nothing to eat). But they didn’t even think about evacuating the family; my mother-in-law had to leave school and work at the factory, because... working meal ticket Her mother and little sister really needed it. The work was hard, my mother-in-law lost sight in one eye, but it was impossible to survive without work. This is how the mother-in-law explained her action at that time, and not due to high Komsomol consciousness.

But Alekseeva pulled trolleys precisely because of the desire to help the Motherland, and not for the sake of some kind of food card.

Why did such a conscientious girl later become a dissident? Oddly enough, Wikipedia has an answer to this question:

“In 1945, Lyudmila entered the first year of the history department of Moscow State University. After a week of classes, she was elected Komsomol organizer of the group, but soon she was told that the Komsomol organizer should be a front-line soldier. As Alekseeva later noted in her memoirs, front-line soldiers of a “special breed” went to the history department - those who became party and Komsomol functionaries in the army and felt a taste for power over people.

Historical science they were not interested, but they were building their future careers as managers. To be noticed by their senior comrades, student functionaries initiated “personal cases”, accusing fellow students of disloyalty, loss of vigilance and other sins.

Observing such proceedings, Alekseeva formulated a theory for herself that the party was infiltrated by people devoid of moral principles. She was pondering the dilemma of whether to join the party to fight for the purity of its ranks, or to stay away from it. At that time I settled on the second option.”

Aren't these front-line soldiers bastards! Just think, we fought! They wanted to become leaders! The poor girl who pulled trolleys was kicked out of the Komsomol! How could one not be offended by the Soviet regime?

By the way, it’s interesting: did Moscow State University accept all first-year girls directly into the CPSU? And you didn't need any candidate experience?

In general, some genius wrote an article about Alekseeva on Wikipedia. How do you like this paragraph:

“Another way to escape from reality for Lyudmila Mikhailovna was her personal life. An old friend of their family, military man Valentin Alekseev, proposed to her. Lyudmila convinced herself that she was in love and agreed to get married, and soon discovered that she was pregnant. Family life and caring for the child made it possible to forget about the surrounding injustice of Stalinist society...”

Even when having sex with her husband and aunt’s son, Lyudmila did it for a reason, but to forget about the injustice! And she ate the rolls with the same feeling, and she slurped the borscht not just anyhow, but as a sign of protest against the Gulags!

Lyudmila studied in graduate school at Moscow State University until 1956, but never took part in the defense - because “in 1953, after the death of I.V. Stalin and the arrest of L.P. Beria, Alekseeva experienced a worldview crisis.” However, this crisis did not prevent her from joining the CPSU back in 1952, apparently as a sign of protest against injustice.

From 1956 to 1977 Alekseeva worked at the Nauka publishing house and at the INION of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Not a bad place, I would say.

And in the 1960s, Alekseeva became a dissident:

“Her apartment became a place for meetings of dissidents and the Moscow intelligentsia, interviews with Western correspondents, and was also used for the production and storage of samizdat. She provided legal and organizational assistance to political prisoners in the USSR, and traveled to camps and exile. In 1968-1972, she participated as a typist in the publication of “Chronicles of Current Events”, distributed samizdat...”

And how did she, in whose capacity did she travel freely through the camps and exiles? Perhaps as a freelance agent of the department in which Putin began, known for his outstanding sympathy for this current “old woman Izergil”?

“In April 1968, she was expelled from the CPSU and fired from her job. As official reason it was indicated that she took part in speeches by human rights activists against trials 1966-1968 over the poet Yu.G. Galankov, writers Yu.M. Daniel and A.D. Sinyavsky, as well as journalist A.I. Ginsburg.

In 1974, she received a KGB warning, based on a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, for “the systematic production and distribution of anti-Soviet works”, about the inadmissibility of continuing “anti-Soviet activities” and possible arrest.”

The description of the atrocities of the bloody Gebni makes one's hair stand on end. They gave a warning instead of an encouragement!

“In 1976, at the suggestion of dissident Yuri Orlov, she became one of the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) in the USSR...”

Dissident - another one interesting profession. But it was only possible to truly work as a dissident abroad. Here there are continuous warnings and no money is paid. And there everything is as it should be: daily allowance, allowance.

“In February 1977, under the threat of arrest, Lyudmila Alekseeva was forced, together with her second husband Nikolai Williams, to youngest son Mikhail, a graduate of the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University, emigrated from the USSR and settled in the USA.”

Here! They've made more threats! For years they actually threatened and threatened me - and forced me to go to this colony-settlement, to the Indians of that overseas side!.. However, as it turned out, not to the Indians.

“In exile, Alekseeva was a foreign representative of the MHG. She worked at the Voice of America and Freedom radio stations, where she hosted programs on human rights. She published in periodicals of Russian-speaking emigration, acted as a consultant to several human rights organizations and trade unions...

Received US citizenship in 1982, five years after leaving the USSR ... "

She got promoted!

And in 1993, when best friend of the American people, Yeltsin finally took power in Russia and returned to Moscow. But without relatives, who stayed in the USA just in case.

Since then, she has not left our TV screens - and was hung with all sorts of honorary regalia like a New Year tree.

But whose rights did Alekseeva defend in 1993, when the first Russian parliament was shot? History is silent.

But after that bloody execution, about which the successful human rights activist tactfully kept silent about the alarm bell, her new political growth began. Since 1996, she has been the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group. In 1998-2004 - President of the International Helsinki Federation.

Since 2002 - member of the Human Rights Commission under the President of the Russian Federation. After the transformation of the Commission in November 2004, it joined the Council for the Promotion of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights under the same president. She was also a member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Internal Affairs and a member of the Public Advisory Council under the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation.

In this new socio-political role, she deftly maintained parity between the interests of the Russian government and its opponents.

So in 2003 she spoke out against the war in Iraq. In 2004, she became one of the co-chairs of the All-Russian Civil Congress (together with Garry Kasparov and Georgiy Satarov), but left it due to disagreement with Kasparov’s radicalism.

She participated with Eduard Limonov in Strategy-31, but then left it due to disagreements with Limonov.

Participated in the “Ukraine – Russia: Dialogue” congress, held in April 2014 in Kyiv...

And always these entrances and exits only raised her personal value - right up to the already mentioned favor of Putin towards her, who almost kissed her hand on her anniversaries...

She had awards: the Sakharov Prize, the Olof Palme Prize, the Natalya Estemirova Prize “Man of Honor and Conscience”, officer of the Legion of Honor (France, 2007), commander of the Order of Merit for the Federal Republic of Germany (2009), Knight of the Order Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas (2008)… And dozens more equally high-profile and honorable titles, you’ll be tired of listing…

It seems that people like Alekseeva were needed Russian authorities in order to right moment, using their international authority, to stand up for us somewhere and somehow...

This is confirmed by the fact that very different people arrived to say goodbye to Alekseeva:

“The farewell ceremony was attended by Russian President Putin, Human Rights Commissioner Moskalkova, journalist Svanidze, head of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation Fedotov, oppositionists Navalny and Dmitry Gudkov, head Accounts Chamber Kudrin, State Duma Speaker Volodin and many other famous figures.”

Our media hastened to write that Alekseeva will be buried at the Troekurovskoye cemetery in Moscow. But they naively miscalculated.

“Russian human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva will be buried in the United States - in the same place as other members of her family.” Her son, professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Mikhail Alekseev, told the Moscow agency about this.

How is it with Akhmatova in the poem “Native Land?

“But we lie down in it and become it,

That’s why we call it so freely – ours.”

Here's what it is - motherland. For Alekseeva, it was formed in the USA. And for us she simply worked as a “human rights activist.” And our president greatly appreciated her work.

But it’s still hard to resist the thought that her will to be buried in a historical foreign land is such a posthumous spit in our face. Including in the face of the President of the Russian Federation, who bestowed the highest honors on her.

uborshizzza

______

Voice of the people

Vlad Vlad:

What a blessing that the native land of the ancestral Russian intellectual will not be stained with stench. We are in the shit, not in the spitting, when we allowed ourselves to call this thin intelligentsia a defender of rights. Gaspada, will the time come to us when we will wash ourselves away from our shameful trust in intellectuals and cleanse our Motherland? Tired of holding back vomit.

Andrey Timeskov:

Animal protection epitaph on the death of human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva. There is a very apt saying, the original idea of ​​which is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte himself: “Tell me how you feel about dogs, and I will tell you what kind of person you are!” “Animal defenders have many times turned to famous Russian human rights activists, such as Lyudmila Alekseeva, Boris Nemtsov and Lev Ponomarev, asking for help in protecting animals from cruelty. We argued this by saying that, having practiced torturing and killing dogs and cats, sadists always switch to people. The answer was only arrogant silence or condescending grins, supplemented by lectures from the series “here people are starving, and you and your dogs/cats are climbing in…” Or even something worse, like Alekseeva’s demarche against the use of service dogs to search for drugs in schools... Continued in the independent magazine “Zoohumanism”.

Igor Shapovalov:

“..How did dad escape repression? Why did 297 of his colleagues sit down, but he didn’t? Why did dad get housing in the center of Moscow?..” But I wonder how..? In fact, there is nothing mysterious here, it’s just that her dad knocked and wrote denunciations against his colleagues, so he received as a reward the apartment of one of those arrested based on his denunciation. “And how did she, in whose capacity did she travel freely through the camps and exiles? Perhaps as a freelance agent of the department in which Putin started...” Taking into account the fact that all these “human rights activists” were constantly under the close tutelage of the very department in which Putin began, and also the fact that her dad was an informer on his colleagues for which he received an apartment at one time, then the daughter, apparently, did not go far from her father.. The apple does not fall far from the tree. That's what all these human rights activists are like...

Vladimir Krivoruchko:

A KGB officer asks the drummer of the philharmonic orchestra after the concert: “Why are you knocking like that, comrade?” -This is my party. -We have only one party, but we need to knock more often! or during the intermission of a concert, two people in civilian clothes approach the musicians. - Why is the fellow drummer messing around at such an important concert? Everyone is playing and working, but he only tapped his stick a couple of times. - It’s just my party! - the drummer makes excuses. - Give it up! We all, comrade musician, only have one part, but we need to knock more often!

Lyudmila Alekseeva has remained at the helm of human rights affairs in Russia for many years - she began her journey back in the USSR, when she defended the rights of writers and poets to express their thoughts, for which she was expelled from the Union at one time. Currently, her activities have subsided; Alekseeva also became part of several state human rights institutions.

Family

Lyudmila Alekseeva (nee Slavinskaya) was born in Yevpatoria in the family of Mikhail Lvovich Slavinsky and Valentina Afanasyevna Efimenko.

Lyudmila Mikhailovna's parents came from poor families, to whom the revolution gave them the opportunity to get higher education- My father studied to become an economist, my mother studied mathematics.

Subsequently, Lyudmila Alekseeva’s mother worked at the Institute of Mathematics Academy of Sciences USSR, taught at the Moscow Higher Technical School, wrote a number of textbooks on higher mathematics for university students. I was involved in raising little Lyuda Estonian granny.

Alekseeva is a widow. First husband - Valentin Alekseev, military man, teacher at the Zhukovsky Academy. The second is Nicholas Williams, school teacher, dissident, writer.

Mother of two sons (from her first marriage): Sergei and Mikhail.

Biography

From Lyudmila’s early childhood, her family settled in Moscow, initially living in a barracks in Ostankino.

In 1937, they moved to the center of Moscow into a communal apartment, which was vacated after the arrest of one of the senior officials of the Central Union, the department in which Mikhail Slavinsky worked.

On July 14, 1941, Slavinsky went to the front. Alekseeva, along with other children of employees of the Institute of Mathematics, was evacuated to Kazakhstan.

In the spring of 1943, Lyudmila Alekseeva and her mother returned to Moscow. Lyudmila did not go to school, she turned to Komsomol organization with a request to send her to the front or to a defense enterprise. She was sent to the construction of the metro station "Stalinskaya" (now "Semyonovskaya"), Lyudmila dragged trolleys with rock from the tunnel.

In 1945, Lyudmila Alekseeva entered the first year of the history department Moscow State University. After a week of classes, she was elected Komsomol organizer of the group, but soon she was told that the Komsomol organizer should be a front-line soldier, and the decision was revised.

As Lyudmila Alekseeva later noted in her memoirs, front-line soldiers of a “special breed” went to the history department - those who became party and Komsomol functionaries in the army and felt a taste for power over people.

They were not interested in historical science, but they were building their future careers as leaders. In order to be noticed by their senior comrades, student functionaries initiated “personal cases”, accusing fellow students of disloyalty, loss of vigilance and other sins. A student could be expelled from the university even for not turning in the banner on time after the demonstration.

In 1950, she graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University and began teaching history at one of the vocational schools in Moscow, and also became a freelance lecturer for the regional committee. Komsomol.

In 1952 Alekseeva joined CPSU.

In 1956, Alekseeva graduated from graduate school at the Moscow Economic and Statistical Institute. From that same year, Alekseeva’s apartment became a place for storing and distributing “samizdat”; meetings of the intelligentsia were also held there.

In 1959-1968 she worked as a scientific editor of the archeology and ethnography editorial office in the publishing house "The science".

In 1966, she began to participate in human rights activists against the arrest and conviction of writers. Andrey Sinyavsky And Yuri Daniel who published their books abroad, bypassing Soviet censorship. At the same time, Alekseeva became one of the initiators of providing financial assistance to political prisoners and their families.

In 1967, Alekseeva joined the campaign launched by human rights activists in connection with the political trial Alexander Ginzburg And Yuri Galankov.

In April 1968, for participating in the human rights movement, she was expelled from the ranks of the CPSU and fired from her job. In the same year, Alekseeva began reprinting the first human rights bulletin in the USSR "Chronicle of Current Events".

In 1970, Alekseeva became an employee of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

In May 1976, she joined a new human rights organization - Moscow Helsinki Group and became the editor and custodian of the organization's documents.

In 1974, by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Alekseeva was warned for “the systematic production and distribution of anti-Soviet works.”

At the end of February 1977, Alekseeva was forced to emigrate from the USSR. She settled in USA, was published in the Russian-language emigrant, as well as in the English and American press.

In 1980, she compiled a reference book on currents in Soviet dissent. Then she revised it into the monograph “The History of Dissent in the USSR. The Newest Period.” This book became the first fundamental historical research on this topic, which has not lost its significance in the future.

In the summer of 1989, Alekseeva became an absentee member of the restored Moscow Helsinki Group.

The human rights activist returned to Russia in 1993.

In May 1996, she was elected chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

In November 1998, she headed the International Helsinki Federation (she held this post until November 2004).

Alekseeva has a number of awards:

officer of the Legion of Honor (France, 2007). Commander of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Germany, 2009). Knight of the Order of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas (Lithuania, February 5, 2008). Order of the Cross of the Land of Mary, 3rd class (Estonia, 2012).

Alekseeva was awarded several prizes:

Prize "For Freedom of Thought" named after Andrey Sakharov; Olof Palme Prize; Award of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR) "Person of the Year - 5765"; Natalya Estimirova Prize "Man of Honor and Conscience"

Policy

On October 19, 2002, Alekseeva was included in the Human Rights Commission under the President of Russia, later transformed into the Council for Promoting the Development of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights.

At the end of December 2004, Alekseeva became a member of the Human Rights Commission under the Mayor of Moscow. In the same month, she was elected co-chairman of the Organizing Committee (later the committee was named the Supervisory Council) of the All-Russian Civil Congress "Russia for Democracy, Against Dictatorship" - together with the head of the INDEM Foundation. Georgy Satarov.

In January 2005, Alekseeva was awarded the prize Olof Palme.

In June 2006, Alekseeva took part in organizing the conference “The Other Russia”. Representatives of the opposition held this conference in opposition to the G8 summit taking place at that time in St. Petersburg.

In July 2007, due to leadership rivalry "Other Russia"(conflict between the leader of the United Civil Front Garry Kasparov and leader of the People's Democratic Union Mikhail Kasyanov) founders of "The Other Russia" - Satarov, Lyudmila Alekseeva and Alexander Auzan left its ranks.

In December 2007, Satarov, Alekseeva and Kasparov were re-elected co-chairs All-Russian Civil Congress. However, already in January 2008, Alekseeva and Satarov announced that they were leaving the posts of co-chairs, since “the most negative inherent in modern Russian political practice".

Since August 31, 2009, Alekseeva took an active part in "Strategy-31"— regular demonstrations by citizens on Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square in defense of Article 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation (on freedom of assembly).

On December 31, 2009, during an attempt to hold another rally on Triumfalnaya Square, Lyudmila Alekseeva was detained by riot police and, along with dozens of other detainees, taken to the police station, which caused a great resonance in Russia and abroad.

At the end of 2010, we disagreed on the tactics of holding events with Eduard Limonov and left Strategy-31. Alekseeva took 10th place in the ranking "100 most influential women in Russia" for 2011 (Echo of Moscow, RIA Novosti, Ogonyok and Interfax).

On June 22, 2012, it became known that Lyudmila Alekseeva submitted a statement of resignation from the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, not agreeing with the new procedure for forming the council.

Alekseeva admitted that the Moscow Helsinki Group “works almost entirely on grants from American foundations.” However, after the law on NPOs performing the functions of a foreign agent came into force in November 2012, MHG refused foreign funding and turned to Russian citizens for support.

In December 2012, State Duma deputy from "United Russia" Irina Yarovaya accused Alekseeva, who criticizes the legislative initiatives in response to the adoption of the Magnitsky Act in the United States, of serving the interests of the United States: " US citizen Ms. Alekseeva took an oath of allegiance to the United States, completely renounced Russia and pledged to fight only on the side of the United States, even with arms in hand.".

Alekseeva supported the initiative of the Committee of Civil Initiatives Alexey Kudrin about holding a civil forum on November 23, 2013 in Moscow and joined its organizing committee.

In May 2015, a bill was introduced to the State Duma increasing the number of grounds for the use of force law enforcement agencies. Deputies proposed allowing the use of batons and stun guns to suppress crimes or violations of the rules of detention in colonies and detention centers.

On May 29, Alekseeva and other human rights activists held single pickets at the State Duma against this bill, which they nicknamed "the law of sadists".

Alekseeva also announced her readiness to start a hunger strike: " This law cannot be passed. I'm sure it won't be accepted. I will protest against him in every way possible and impossible for me. For example, a hunger strike. This law cannot be passed", said the human rights activist.

Rumors (scandals)

In August 2004, Alekseeva and the leader of the Youth Human Rights Movement Andrey Yurov received threatening letters from the leader of the Slavic Union Dmitry Demushkin. The sheet depicts a sniper, with the inscription underneath: “Girenko, Yurov, Alekseeva.” Nikolai Girenko, a scientist from St. Petersburg, was killed in June 2004 in his apartment.

In June 2008, during a press conference in defense of prisoners, Alekseev was pelted with eggs by a group of young people, presumably from LDPR.

On March 31, 2009, Lyudmila Alekseeva was hit by a certain Konstantin Pereverzev, when she laid flowers at the Park Kultury metro station in memory of those killed in terrorist act, and was detained.

The incident was condemned by a member of the presidium of the Solidarity movement Boris Nemtsov and the Russian Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin. For “causing beatings out of hooligan motives,” Pereverzev was sentenced to one year’s probation.

In the summer of 2010, at the annual forum of pro-Kremlin youth on Seliger, Alekseeva became one of the heroes of the installation "You are not welcome here". A plastic head with a photograph of her in a headdress with fascist symbols was impaled on a stake.

In January 2012, TV presenter Arkady Mamontov published documents proving that the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alekseeva, has obligations to the UK (from where she received grants) and to the USA (she is a citizen of this country). A request was sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs with a demand to explain how public council turned out to be a US citizen.

A Soviet dissident, the head of one of the oldest human rights organizations in Russia, Lyudmila Alekseeva, at the age of 92, she was perhaps the most authoritative person in human rights circles: for some, officially - Lyudmila Mikhailovna, but among themselves, many human rights activists simply called her - " Grandma Luda."

In her youth, Alekseeva shared communist views and was even a member of the CPSU for some time, but then left the party. During the Khrushchev Thaw, her apartment became a storage place for samizdat, meetings of dissidents and representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia.

Her human rights colleagues speak of her as a selfless, constantly and hard-working person who, while showing flexibility, never betrays her ideals. Meanwhile, Alekseeva, respected in human rights circles, has often been criticized due to foreign funding of the MHG and her own American citizenship. She, like many human rights activists, has more than once become the object of being labeled as a “State Department agent” or a “fifth column.” But she was a human rights activist - one of the “patriarchs” of human rights protection in Russia.

She stood up for many and did not hesitate to make a request to the president. At one time, she asked him to pardon ex-senator Igor Izmestyev, sentenced to life, and she also offered to take under the patronage of the charitable foundation of the tragically deceased Elizaveta Glinka - Doctor Lisa. The head of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, Mikhail Fedotov, often recalled one of her phrases - “chicken grain by grain” - this is how she acted, not in a hurry, but systematically moving towards the goal, she taught this to others. She also taught compassion.

During the recent rotation in the Presidential Human Rights Council, Alekseeva again became a member of it. Last year, Alekseeva became a laureate of the state award for outstanding achievements in the field of human rights activities. She donated the monetary portion of the award to the needs of her organization. “I will give the prize to my group, like all my prizes, since I am being awarded not as Grandma Lyuda, but as the chairman of the famous Moscow Helsinki Group,” she said then.

Alekseeva was born in 1927 in Yevpatoria, a seaside resort town in western Crimea. The family moved to Moscow when Lyudmila was a child. Alekseeva’s parents shared communist views, apparently, which is why the future human rights activist from childhood was sure that she lived in the freest and fairest country, and grew up as an absolutely “Soviet” child. Meanwhile, Stalin’s repressions were unfolding before her eyes - many of her father’s colleagues in the Central Union were subjected to them. He himself also came under investigation, but was not repressed.

During the war, Alekseeva tried more than once to get to the front. In Izhevsk, where she came to visit her mother after evacuation to Northern Kazakhstan, she took nursing courses, but, being a minor, did not go to the front. Upon returning to Moscow in 1943, Alekseeva did not go to school, but again tried to get to the front or to a defense enterprise. Then she was sent to the construction of the Stalinskaya metro station (later renamed Semyonovskaya). What she saw during the war years largely determined her life and partly pushed her into human rights activities. As Alekseeva herself recalled, many factories were evacuated to small Izhevsk, but not a single square meter of housing was built for the people who arrived there. But, in spite of everything - she saw it - people helped each other. According to the human rights activist, it was respect for the feat of the Soviet people in the war that instilled in her the desire to make her fellow citizens live better, and for the authorities to respect their rights and human dignity. People who survived war and achieved victory deserved to be treated as human beings - a belief that played a huge role in her subsequent human rights work.

Party member

In 1945, Alekseeva entered the history department of Moscow State University. Years of study greatly influenced her views. According to Alekseeva’s recollections, many student functionaries and Komsomol members during their years of study at the history department built their future careers as party leaders; they often initiated “personal cases” against fellow students for any minor “misdemeanors.” Perhaps this was the first time that Alekseeva began to doubt the CPSU - it seemed to her that the party had been infiltrated by people devoid of moral principles and seeking power.

After Moscow State University and graduate school at the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics, Alekseeva began teaching history at a vocational school in Moscow and was a freelance lecturer for the Komsomol (Komsomol). In 1952, Alekseeva joined the CPSU, but soon her views changed, she became disillusioned with the party, abandoned her PhD in the history of the CPSU and abandoned her scientific career. And the Khrushchev Thaw - the time of the birth of the human rights (dissident, as it was called in the USSR) movement - was marked by a turning point in her own life - she found herself in the ranks of human rights activists, fighters, and Soviet dissidents. Then her apartment became a meeting place for Moscow intellectuals and dissidents and a “handicraft printing house” - a place for storing and reproducing samizdat, which, according to her, was the quintessence of artistic, political, and social thought of that time and previous times.

Dissident

Her first human rights activities began ten years before the creation of the MHG. In 1966, she, along with other dissidents, spoke out in defense of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who were tried for publishing their works abroad - bypassing Soviet censorship. At the end of the decade, she took part in speeches in connection with the political process against samizdat activists - journalist Alexander Ginzburg and poet Yuri Galanskov, who were accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation. Then Alekseeva took up the topic of political prisoners and became one of the initiators of providing material assistance to them and their families.

This ends for her with expulsion from the party and dismissal from her job in 1968. But her human rights activities do not end there: she signs documents for the dissident movement and becomes a typist for the first human rights bulletin in the USSR - the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events. The first "Chronicle" was printed on Alekseeva's typewriter - an old, heavy "Underwood" from the 1920s. At this time, the human rights activist met perhaps the most famous Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov.

But along with this, systematic searches and interrogations came into her life. One day in 1974, Alekseeva was called to the Lubyanka and told - as a preventative measure - that a case was ready against her under Article 70 (anti-Soviet agitation or propaganda), and if she continued her activities, she would immediately be brought to justice.

In 1976, Alekseeva joined the newly created MHG, became the editor and custodian of the organization’s documents, and her apartment became a kind of office for the group. The oldest existing human rights organization in Russia, the Group for Assistance to the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR (MHG) was created to collect and publish information on violations of the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Accords. At the MHG, Alekseeva worked side by side with Yuri Orlov, Mikhail Bernshtam, Elena Bonner, Alexander Ginzburg, Anatoly Marchenko, Vitaly Rubin, Anatoly Sharansky.

Emigrant

In 1977, during another search of the apartment, samizdat and foreign human rights literature were confiscated. Under threat of arrest, she was forced to emigrate and settled in the United States, where she became a foreign representative of the MHG. Over time, she received American citizenship, and returned to her homeland only in 1993 - but not to the Soviets, but to Russia. During the years of emigration, she prepared the publication of MHG documents and hosted programs on Radio Liberty and Voice of America. In the USA, she published her memoirs “The Thaw Generation” and the monograph “The History of Dissent in the USSR. The Newest Period,” which was initially planned as a reference book on the dissident movement in the USSR, but eventually the work grew into a real study. Thus, Alekseeva became the first Russian researcher of the dissident movement of the USSR; this work still remains the most complete and comprehensive study on this topic. In the 1980s, as part of the US delegation, she took part in OSCE conferences (Reykjavik, Paris).

Head of the revived MHG

Returning to Russia, she headed the MHG in 1996. Alekseeva herself said that she hesitated when she was offered to head the MHG, but in the end she decided to test herself as a “boss.” As the leader of the movement “For Human Rights” Lev Ponomarev recalled, he and Alekseeva jointly set about reviving the organization - the group did not meet for a long time, people left, the organization bore the name MHG, but did not really work. According to him, the human rights activist returned to Russia consciously - she wanted to build democracy here - and it was she who became the engine for the restoration of the MHG. She had her own office, but more often she worked at home. According to Ponomarev, Alekseev is an example of devotion, “exorbitant,” as he put it in one of his interviews, devotion to his work; she often neglects her health and devotes all her time to work. For many human rights activists, she has become a standard, a moral authority. Everyone talks about her dedication - she dedicated her whole life to protecting human rights. And her qualities helped in this - activity, inflexibility and at the same time compassion for people and a desire to help. Lev Ponomarev notes in her a combination of a sober, practical mind and dedication to the human rights cause: according to him, she manages to interact with the authorities and maintain her human rights face. After the law “on foreign agents” came into force, the MHG refused foreign funding and turned to Russian citizens for support.

Russian human rights activist

For ten years, Alekseeva was a member of the Human Rights Commission under the President of the Russian Federation, later transformed into the Presidential Human Rights Council (HRC), but left it due to disagreement with the new procedure for forming the council. She participated in the preparation of large-scale events related to the consolidation of civil society in Russia: she was one of the organizers and three co-chairs of the All-Russian Civil Congress, and joined the organizing committee of the Civil Forum, held in 2013 on the initiative of the committee of civil initiatives of ex-Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation Alexei Kudrin. Since 2009, Alekseeva has taken an active part in citizens’ speeches on the 31st of every month on Triumfalnaya Square in defense of Article 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation on freedom of assembly - “Strategy-31”. During the next action, she was detained by riot police and taken to the police station. This incident caused a huge resonance both in Russia and abroad.

She received threats from nationalists, she was accused of serving the interests of the United States, eggs were thrown at her at a press conference in defense of prisoners, her photograph was used in an offensive installation with the inscription “you are not welcome here” at the Seliger youth forum. She was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, was among the ten most influential women in Russia, and was awarded the most famous human rights awards and prizes.