Alone among Soviet dissidents of the Leonid Brezhnev years, Sergei Kovalev, who has died aged 91, went on to play a major role in the eras of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, only to find that his outspoken support for human rights put him once again in opposition to the Russian government.
Kovalev had already sacrificed a scientific career in the late 1960s to speak out against the Soviet state’s abuse of human rights and was one of the leading campaigners to be imprisoned under Brezhnev. Appointed against strong opposition as chairman of the Russian parliament’s human rights commission in 1990, and human rights ombudsman in 1994, he was forced to resign following a series of brave and damning reports from Chechnya in 1995. A quiet, almost self-effacing man, he became the hero of the internal opposition to the genocidal war.
Continue reading...This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
