Human rights pioneer

Born: July 20, 1927;

Died: December 8, 2018

LYUDMILA Alexeyeva, who has died aged 91, was a human rights pioneer and dissident who challenged the Soviet and Russian regimes for decades, demanding that they free political prisoners and establish democratic rights.

The gentle but courageous activist was born under dictator Josef Stalin's regime. She risked her own freedom to protest against the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s and co-founded the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia's oldest human rights organisation, in 1976.

Alexeyeva faced death threats throughout her career and was forced into exile by Soviet authorities in 1977. She returned to Russia in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and continued her work energetically, but suspicion of non-governmental organisations under President Vladimir Putin's rule increasingly impeded her activities.

In 2014, she announced that the Moscow Helsinki Group had laid off most of its staff and cut pay for the remainder. The move followed declining foreign donations in the wake of legislation requiring groups receiving such funding to register as "foreign agents."

Alexeyeva relentlessly pressed the Soviet authorities to improve human rights, through times of crushing repression and those of relative tolerance, a job that required enormous patience.

After the Soviet collapse, she turned into a respectful but insistent voice urging that Russia's newly elected leadership live up to its rhetoric about democracy and the rule of law.

Despite Putin's early patronage, including his naming her to an advisory council, Alexeyeva was a leading critic of Russia's second war in Chechnya, launched in 1999 during Putin's first term as prime minister, and of Putin's weakening of Russia's democratic institutions.

Born in Crimea in 1927, Alexeyeva studied archaeology at Moscow State University. She was drawn into the dissident movement during the Khrushchev thaw, the period of relaxed censorship under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s and early 1960s.

In the early 1970s, Alexeyeva worked on the Chronicle of Current Events, the most important of the dissident underground journals typed up on onionskin sheets backed by carbon copy paper and circulated hand-to-hand.

Like other dissidents, including the author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexeyeva was threatened with arrest unless she left the Soviet Union. The mother of two fled with her younger son, Mikhail, in 1977, eventually settling in the United States.

Many liberal Russians have blamed the country's leaders for steering Russia toward authoritarianism. But Alexeyeva said Russia's problem was not its leaders, it was its weak society, which she said was incapable of holding leaders to account.

"I don't think the leaders of Western democracies are really such strong democrats," she said, but added that Western leaders have to support human rights and the rule of law or risk being voted out.

Alexeyeva said she often received death threats and sometimes wondered if she dismissed them too lightly. She said neither she nor her colleagues would give up their human rights cause.

"I don't know of a single person who works with me who would stop doing what they are doing because of threats," she said. "If I stopped what I am doing now, life wouldn't be interesting to me."

Alexeyeva is survived by her two sons, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren