12 July 2014

Source: HRO.org (info)

• Moscow city & Moscow region Victims of repressions

Valeriya Novodvorskaya, dissident, political prisoner in the Soviet era, founder of the first opposition democratic party in the USSR (Democratic Union) writer, has died in Moscow.

Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya (17 May 1950, Baranovichi, Belorussian SSR, USSR - 12 July 2014, Moscow).

In 1968 she completed high school in Moscow with a silver medal. She studied to be a translator and teacher of French at the Maurice Thorez Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages.

She organized an underground student group discussing the need for the overthrow of the Communist regime.

On 5 December 1969 Valeriya Novodvorskaya disseminated leaflets with anti-Soviet verses of her own composition, ‘Thank you, Party!’ in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses. She was immediately arrested by the KGB and charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR) for distributing leaflets criticizing the invasion by Warsaw Pact forces of Czechoslovakia.

She was put in solitary confinement in Lefortovo prison. When Daniil Lunts, head of the diagnostic department of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Medicine, visited her there she told him that he was ‘from the Inquisition, a sadist and a collaborationist.’

She was subjected to punitive psychiatric measures for political reasons. From June 1970 until February 1972 she was held in a special psychiatric hospital in Kazan and subjected to forcible treatment.

She was released in February and immediately started to print and distribute samizdat.

From 1973 to 1975 she worked as a teacher in a children’s holiday home. From 1975 to 1990 she translated medical literature at the Second Moscow Medical Institute.

In 1977 she graduated from the evening faculty of foreign languages at the Krupskaya Moscow Region Pedagogical Institute.

In 1977 and 1978 she sought to create an underground political party to fight against the CPSU. On 28 October 1978 she was one of the founders of the Freed Inter-Professional Association of Workers (Russian acronym: SMOT).

She was frequently and systematically harassed by the authorities: placed in psychiatric hospitals, subjected to questioning, and her apartment was searched.

In 1978, 1985 and 1986 Novodvorskaya was prosecuted for dissident activities. From 1987 until May 1991 she organized anti-Soviet rallies and demonstrations in Moscow without official permission, for which she was detained by the police and imprisoned a total of 17 times.

In 1988 she participated in the creation of the political party Democratic Union.

In May 1991, and in January and August 1995 Novodvorskaya was prosecuted, although charges were subsequently dropped.

In 2000 she worked as a journalist and educationalist..

She published articles in Grani.ru, Ekho of Moscow, and The New Times.

She is author of a number of books: Beyond Despair, Catcher in the Lie, My Carthage Must Be Destroyed, Farewell of the Slavic Woman, Poets and Tsars.