A pioneering Soviet dissident who was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp for his human rights campaign and clashed with Boris Yeltsin and Boris Yeltsin. Vladimir Putin Died at the age of 91 due to the retrogression of democracy in Russia.
Sergei Kovalev, the chronicler of abuse of power in the Soviet Union, co-founded the Soviet Union’s first open and independent human rights organization in 1969. Later, he served in the notorious Perm-36 concentration camp for 7 years. He was ordered to return to Moscow in 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became Russia’s first human rights commissioner and denounced Yeltsin. Grozny’s carpet bombing During the first Chechen War, he later found himself opposed to Putin.
In a dramatic episode, he negotiated directly with Chechen militants led by Shamir Basayev during the hostage crisis in Bujunovsk Hospital in North Caucasus, Russia in 1995. In the end, at least 129 people were killed in the incident after a botched assault raid.
His son wrote in a social media post that Kovalev died “in his sleep” on Monday morning.
“We will miss Sergey in all aspects: as a beloved old friend, fearless ally, intellectual and consultant, always loyal to the concept of human rights in wars and working days, politics and daily life.”, Kovalev in 1990 Commemoration, the human rights organization that helped establish it in 1988, wrote in a statement.
As Russia exerted greater pressure on independent human rights advocates such as Kovalev, the memorial hall of Russia’s oldest human rights organization was appointed as a “foreign agent” in 2013.
As a trained biologist, Kovalev rejected the genetic theory officially recognized by the Soviet government in an open letter in 1956, thus angering the KGB. By the late 1960s, he became a public dissident, and in 1969 he co-founded the Action Team to Defend Human Rights. He is also the editor of “Chronicles of Current Events”, a famous samizdat publication that disseminates powerful articles and reports on false trials and other human rights violations in the Soviet Union.
In 1974, he was sentenced to 7 years in prison for “anti-Soviet incitement and propaganda” and then exiled to Kolyma in the Russian Far East for another three years. Permanently exiled from Moscow, his return required the official decree of Gorbachev in 1986 because he introduced a period of openism.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Kovalev helped establish the memorial and became an outstanding official, both the Russian human rights commissioner and the Duma member. He had a famous conflict with Yeltsin during the bombing of Grozny. He said that “only you can stop this meaningless war.”
He was also highly critical of Putin and wisely predicted that within a few days after he was promoted to president, Russia would experience a democratic regression.
“I believe Vladimir Putin is the most sinister figure in contemporary Russian history,” he wrote in a 2007 article for The New York Review of Books. “From the very beginning of his reign, he has commanded-and almost completed-a broad anti-democratic counter-revolution in Russia.”
