The right to be a man: In memory of Lyudmila Alekseeva
Dmitry Kurkin
What Lyudmila Alekseeva, the co-founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, passed away between two Days of Constitutions, the Soviet (December 5) and the Russian (December 12), of course, no more than an accident, but to see this as symbolism is not at all difficult. With the requirement to "respect her own constitution" in 1965, her human rights activities began. Yes, and pictures in which her, dressed in a suit of the Snow Maiden, on the Triumphal Square detains the riot police, were made at a rally in defense of the 31st article, guaranteeing freedom of assembly. Those photos have already become famous, but somehow they forgot that Alekseev, who was released that evening, did not go to meet the New Year, but stood up for the rest of the detainees. The constitution for her has always been not a declaration of intent and not a formal agreement to which one can especially ignore, but a cornerstone without which no civil society can be built. The basis without which it is impossible.
The author of over a hundred works on human rights issues, including The History of Dissent in the USSR, the first and, in the opinion of many commentators, the most complete chronicle of Soviet dissidence, she put human rights work above politics. Even in times when it was impossible to separate one from another. Because of this principled position, it is often, especially in recent years, considered too naive, even a convenient figure for the official authorities. In spite of his predecessor, Kremlin political technologist Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the administration Vyacheslav Volodin, for example, emphasized the human rights activist on the arm and organized her meetings with the president (at last she surprised colleagues with a petition for former senator Igor Izmestyev, who considered them most effective in the proposed circumstances). The president himself congratulated Lyudmila Alekseev on her birthday, and now she intends to attend her funeral.
The political position of Lyudmila Alekseeva has always been impeccably independent, and the criticism of the system has been heard in each of her public speeches and interviews. Yet it is difficult to imagine another social activist who would host both the president (for her ninetieth birthday), and the participants of the "Marsh Business" who opposed the same president - but for Alekseeva there was no contradiction in this.
Not dividing people into friends and foes, recognizing the right to human dignity for the latter, too, she got used to as early as 1944, when a procession of Wehrmacht prisoners was led along Moscow streets. "[They] were moving with difficulty - lame, barefooted, wounded, with dried blood on dirty dressings. Maybe one of them shot at my father, and the other tortured Tanya. Now they looked pathetic - miserable, humiliated, defeated. I had There are plenty of reasons to hate the fascists, but I did not feel hatred for these people, ”Alekseeva later recalled. Then, because of the inability to share collective anger with fellow citizens, the desire to “hang them all up”, as one of the witnesses to the procession put it, she considered herself weak. Not realizing that in this humanity there was a force that would help her fight for the rights of people for more than half a century, regardless of which side of the barricades they turned out to be.
Alekseeva herself was able to keep with dignity, finding herself under the most severe pressure of the authorities (being dismissed from work in 1968 will be only the first sign of interrogations, searches and hours of conversations with state security officers) or faced with openly cannibalistic provocations. In 2010, the participants of the Nashi movement at Seliger symbolically impaled her portrait on a stake, she reacted calmly: "Public figures should not react painfully if they are insulted." Persistent human rights defenders are often denied a sense of humor, but the story of the New Year’s costume proves the opposite: “I presented my own physiognomy and Snow Maiden. The Snow Maiden is a girl or a young girl, but not an old woman,” Alekseeva commented.
“My grandmother told me:“ You should treat people the way you want people to treat you, even the worst person can never do what you do not want someone to do to you ”,“ said the human rights activist and carried this principle through its life, long, difficult, exciting, inspired more than one generation of those who stand "for our and your freedom."
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (1, 2)