Lyudmila Alexeyeva
Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alekseeva (Russian Людмила Михайловна Алексеева, scientific transliteration Lyudmila Alekseeva Michajlovna; born July 20, 1927 in Evpatoria on the Crimean peninsula ) is a Russian historian, human rights activist and former Soviet dissident.
She was a founding member in 1976 of the Moscow Helsinki Group and since its inception in 2004, a member of the Human Rights Council at the Russian president.
Life
Soviet period
Lyudmila Alekseeva was born on 20 July 1927 in the Soviet Union in Yevpatoria in today Ukrainian Crimea peninsula. During her childhood, the family moved to Moscow, where they initially lived in the suburb of Ostankino in a simple hut until the family in 1937 could move into the center of Moscow. It was a poor family, her parents were given but in the young Soviet Union with an opportunity to a higher education: The father studied economics, his mother worked for a maths degree at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
Lyudmila Alekseeva graduated in 1950 at the Moscow State University study from an archaeological and 1956 to study at the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics. In 1952 she joined the Communist Party of the USSR.
From 1959 to 1968 Lyudmila Alekseeva worked as a science editor at the Soviet Nauka Publishers. During this time, Lyudmila Alekseeva was one of those Soviet dissidents who signed petitions on behalf of persecuted dissidents like Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov. In April 1968, she was expelled from the Communist Party and dismissed by the state Nauka Publishers.
It took from 1970 to 1977 a new activity at the State Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the USSR, but turned disillusioned by the Soviet ideology from and decided on a secure career to dispense as a scientist. During this time she was active human rights activist.
In the spring of 1976, Lyudmila Alekseeva was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which campaigned for compliance with the Helsinki Final Act by the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries. The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE ), the States were on both sides of the Iron Curtain obliged inter alia to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. She became the editor and archivist of this human rights organization and their home has long been the unofficial office of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
Emigration
In February 1977 Lyudmila Alekseeva was forced under threat of arrest, to leave the Soviet Union. She moved to the United States, where he founded a kind of foreign office of the Moscow Helsinki Group, and wrote regularly about the Soviet dissident movement.
In 1985, she published the first comprehensive monograph on the history of the Soviet dissident, in 1990 an autobiography of the Soviet dissident movement with the title The thaw generation.
Lyudmila Alekseeva addition worked as a journalist for Radio Liberty and Voice of America.
Return to Russia
After the collapse of the Soviet Union Lyudmila Alekseeva returned in 1993 returned to Russia and in 1996 was elected chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, since its inception in 2004, she is a member of the Human Rights Council at the Russian president.
It belonged in the past few years the sharpest critics of the human rights policy of the government, especially in the North Caucasus.
Since autumn 2009, Lyudmila Alekseeva is at the forefront of the so-called Strategy 31, an institutionalized peaceful street protest in memory of the paragraph 31 of the Russian Constitution, which grants the freedom of assembly and demonstration.
She lives in Moscow.
Honors
- 2007: Legion of Honor
- 2008: Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas
- 2009: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
- 2012: Order of the Cross - Country Marie (third class)