In November 1988, when the great Russian physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov made his only visit to the US, he asked a few of his fellow human rights activists to accompany him. One of them was biologist Sergei Adamovich Kovalev, who died on Aug. 9 at the age of 91.
Sakharov’s visit was a notable occasion. He had been restricted to living in the provincial city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, until December 1986, when then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, signaling an easing of state repression, telephoned him to let him know he could return to Moscow.
Many scientific groups, human rights organizations and others organized meetings with Sakharov during his visit to the US. I attended a number of these as the executive director of Human Rights Watch. I can still recall that while Sakharov was asked many questions, he generally responded with something like: “Before I comment, I would like to hear Sergei Adamovich’s views on that.”
This was the great physicist’s way of showing respect for the man who, although about 10 years younger, had mentored him in the field of human rights. I also think it was a way to pay tribute to a colleague who had suffered much more from Soviet repression. Whereas Sakharov had spent seven years in internal exile in Gorky, Kovalev had spent seven years in prison, followed by three years of internal exile.
Until his death, Kovalev was the last surviving leader of a Soviet human rights movement that astonished the world, starting in the 1960s. These dissidents spoke out in the heart of a totalitarian empire that stretched across Eurasia. Already in the 1950s, Kovalev had drawn on his scientific training to challenge the doctrines of Joseph Stalin’s favorite scientist, T.D. Lysenko, including by coauthoring the first article published in the Soviet Union criticizing Lysenko’s bizarre theory of genetics.
In 1965, Kovalev participated in the first organized protest against human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, following the arrests of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, two writers who had published abroad under pseudonyms. Then, in 1969, Kovalev founded the Soviet Union’s first human rights organization, the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights.
Much of Kovalev’s human rights advocacy involved the Chronicle of Current Events, which became the leading source of information on human rights developments in the Soviet Union. The journal embodied the approach of the “legalists,” a key segment of the emerging human rights movement at the time.
Because lawyers in the Soviet Union tended to be bureaucrats administering state policies, few of them worked on human rights. Hence, many of the legalists — from Kovalev to physicists Valery Chalidze and Yuri Orlov — were scientists who examined whether provisions of Soviet law complied with the international law to which the nation was ostensibly committed, and whether these provisions were being upheld.
For example, they pointed out that the Soviet constitution’s provision guaranteeing open trials was regularly ignored in practice.
Kovalev’s work through the Initiative Group and the Chronicle led to his arrest in December 1974, followed by his conviction on charges of engaging in anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. The Soviet authorities found a rationale for holding his trial in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, thereby excluding foreign journalists whose press credentials were limited to Moscow.
For his part, Sakharov traveled to Lithuania in an attempt to attend the trial, but he was barred from the courtroom.
Coincidentally, while he was there, his wife, Yelena Bonner, was in Oslo receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on his behalf.
Kovalev would go on to serve most of his seven-year prison sentence at the notorious Perm-36 forced labor camp in the Ural Mountains, and his three years of internal exile in Siberia.
When I saw him not long after the completion of his sentence, he was haggard and emaciated.
In 1990, the Soviet Union’s last full year, Kovalev was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies and chosen — with support from soon-to-be Soviet president Boris Yeltsin — as the chair of its Human Rights Committee. Kovalev made it clear that his focus would be on protecting civil, political and individual rights, rather than the economic, social and collective rights that the Soviet Union claimed to champion.
He made penal reform a major concern, elevated issues such as migrant and refugee rights, and led efforts to abolish Russia’s propiska system, which restricted citizens’ ability to choose their place of residence.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the shelling of the Russian White House in October 1993 and the adoption by referendum of a new constitution two months later, Kovalev was appointed chair of a new Russian Human Rights Commission. Not long thereafter, the Yeltsin government launched the First Chechen War to crush a breakaway Chechen independence movement led by a former Soviet Air Force general, Dzhokhar Dudayev.
Although he was a commissioner of the Russian government, Kovalev became the most outspoken critic of the war. To demonstrate against the bombing of the Chechen capital, Grozny, and to publicize the risks the city’s civilian population faced, he moved there. He also personally conducted investigations into the treatment of Chechen prisoners and issued detailed reports on his findings. Members of the Russian Parliament soon labeled him an enemy of Russia and dismissed him from his post.
In subsequent years, Kovalev was harshly critical of human rights abuses under Yeltsin. When Yeltsin was succeeded by Vladimir Putin, he became even more outspoken in criticizing the new leader’s monopolization of power and denial of civil and political rights.
In a November 2007 essay in the New York Review of Books, Kovalev wrote: “I believe that Vladimir Putin is the most sinister figure in contemporary Russian history.”
In his later years, Kovalev resumed his earlier activism through his work with Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization that he helped found. He remained deeply disappointed by Russia’s reversion to the same kind of despotism he had done so much to help overturn in the previous century.
However, he continued, until the end, to hope against hope.
Aryeh Neier is president emeritus of the Open Society Foundations and a founder of Human Rights Watch.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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