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Sergei Adamovich Kovalyov (also spelledSergey Kovalev; Russian:Сергей Адамович Ковалёв; 2 March 1930 – 9 August 2021) was a Russianhuman rights activist and politician. During the Soviet period he was adissident and, after 1975, apolitical prisoner.
In 1969 Kovalyov was one of a group of dissidents who set up theAction Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, the first such independent body in the Soviet Union.[2][3]: 343 The 14 members of the group first drew public and international attention when they and 38 supporters signed an Appeal about political persecution in the USSR and sent it, over the head of the Soviet government, to the United Nations; meanwhile a number of them also became involved as authors and editors in thesamizdat (self-published) human rights quarterly, theChronicle of Current Events (1968–1983) which first appeared in April 1968.[4] The members of the Action Group came under pressure from the authorities[5] and their statements and activities became intermittent.
Following the arrest ofPyotr Yakir in June 1972 theChronicle did not appear for over a year. On 7 May 1974, Kovalyov,Tatyana Velikanova and Tatyana Khodorovich gave apress conference for foreign journalists, declaring their determination to renew distribution of the bulletin, starting with the three postponed issues.[8] (They were among the editors of theChronicle but did not admit so at the time.) As a consequence two of them were arrested and imprisoned and the third, Tatyana Khodorovich, was forced into emigration. Kovalyov was the first to be detained. He was arrested on 27 December 1974 in Moscow[9] and twelve months later he was put on trial in the Lithuanian capitalVilnius, charged with "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" .[10] Sentenced to ten years imprisonment and exile under Article 70, a "particularly grave crime against the State", Kovalyov served seven years in strict-regime penitentiary facilities for political prisoners (Perm-36 in the Urals andChistopol Prison inTatarstan) followed by three years ofexile inKolyma in theSoviet Far East. On completing his sentence at the end of 1984, he was allowed to settle in Kalinin (todayTver) in central Russia.
The six years of reform initiated by the last Soviet leaderMikhail Gorbachev, often referred to asperestroika andglasnost, led to the release in 1987 of hundreds of political prisoners from the camps, from exile and from psychiatric hospitals,[11] and lifted residence restrictions from those who had completed their sentences. Kovalyov was thus allowed to return to Moscow in 1987.
He became actively involved in a number of organisations that emerged then. In 1989, for instance,Andrei Sakharov recommended him as a co-director of the Project Group for defense of Human Rights, the short-lived Russian-American Human Rights Group. Some bodies like the "Glasnost" press club and the International Humanitarian Conference (December 1987) did not outlast the period: the Gorbachev Politburo was not keen to allow former dissidents to organise national or international gatherings, as their discussions reveal.[12] The Politburo and the KGB were similarly wary ofMemorial, another new organisation that survives until this day.[13] Its dual focus on the repressive Soviet past and the human rights issues of the present, made it particularly suitable for Kovalyov's involvement and he served as its co-chairman for many years after 1990.
From 1993 until 2003, Kovalyov was amember of theRussian State Duma.[1] From 1996 to 2003 he was also a member of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of theCouncil of Europe and a member of the Assembly's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.
In 1993, he co-founded the movement and later, the political partyChoice of Russia (Выбор России), later renamedDemocratic Choice of Russia (Демократический выбор России).Since 1994, Kovalyov, then Yeltsin's human rights adviser, has been publicly opposed to Russia's military involvement inChechnya. FromGrozny, he witnessed the realities of theFirst Chechen War. His daily reports via telephone and on TV galvanized Russian public opinion against the war. For his activism, he was removed from his post in the Duma in 1995.[14] In 1994, he was awarded theHomo Homini Award for human rights activism by the Czech groupPeople in Need.[15]
Kovalyov has been an outspoken critic of authoritarian tendencies in the administrations of Boris Yeltsin andVladimir Putin. In 1996, he resigned as head of Yeltsin's presidential human rights commission, having published anopen letter to Yeltsin, where Kovalyov accused the president of giving up democratic principles. In 2002, he organized a public commission to investigate the1999 Moscow apartment bombings (the Kovalyov Commission[16]), which was effectively paralyzed after one of its members,Sergei Yushenkov, was assassinated,[17][18] another member,Yuri Shchekochikhin, allegedly poisoned withthallium,[19][20] and its legal counsel and investigator,Mikhail Trepashkin, arrested.[21][22]
In 2005, he participated inThey Chose Freedom, a four-part television documentary on the history of the Soviet dissident movement.
Der Flug des weißen Raben: von Sibirien nach Tschetschenien: eine Lebensreise [The flight of the white raven: from Siberia to Chechnya: Autobiography] (in German). Rowohlt Berlin. 1997.ISBN978-3871342561.
Russlands schwieriger Weg und sein Platz in Europa [Russia's difficult path and its place in Europe] (in German). Jena: Collegium Europaeum Jenense an der Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena. 1999.ISBN978-3933159052.
Hood, Roger; Kovalev, Sergei (1999).The death penalty: abolition in Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Pub.ISBN978-9287138743.
Прагматика политического идеализма [Pragmatics of political idealism] (in Russian). Moscow: Институт прав человека. 1999.OCLC162477430.
Мир, страна, личность [World, country, personality] (in Russian). Moscow: Изограф. 2000.ISBN978-5871130858.
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