As a scientist, he was interested in cell research, Sergei Kowaljow wrote more than 60 papers as a doctor of biology at Moscow University. The cell, a tiny unit, susceptible to mutation and easy to destroy, is the beginning of something great. If you look back on the life of the Russian civil rights activist Sergei Kovalev, then the importance of the individual for the big picture definitely plays a role. The expulsion from the university and seven years of imprisonment in the notorious “reformatory” Perm-36 in the Soviet Union, loss of office and intimidation in post-Soviet Russia did not dissuade him from the conviction that the individual, that he, Sergei Kovalev, could play a role for a fairer, more humane society. For decades he was an indomitable man who somehow always wore big suits and building block glasses, and belonged to the moral staff of his country. He has received numerous awards abroad for this, with the Sakharov Prize of the European Parliament, the Olof Palme Prize, the Prize of the French Legion of Honor. But he was also hated from the heart.
He got on everyone’s nerves, right from the start, the Soviet rulers, the Russian, and that part of society that would have so gladly come to terms with the monstrosities of its history and its present. Sergej Kowaljow was born in the Ukraine in 1930, grew up in Moscow and joined the emerging human rights movement. He was one of the co-founders of the “Chronicle of Current Events”, a samizdat documentation of human rights violations and repression.
Kovalyov did not keep a post that turned out to be decorative
After imprisonment and exile, he did not return to Moscow until 1987, where, together with Andrei Sakharov and others, he founded the Moscow “Helsinki Group” and later the human rights organization Memorial. He was a member of the Soviet People’s Congress and the Duma, and in the more open Yeltsin years he was a human rights officer. But Kovalyov did not keep a post that turned out to be decorative, a trophy for those in power. He became internationally known as a bitter opponent of the Chechnya campaigns and criticized the destruction of the Russian Caucasus province. When Chechen fighters led by the terrorist Shamil Basayev attacked a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk and took over 1,100 hostages, he offered himself up for an exchange.
Is it worth mentioning that he did not become a friend of Vladimir Putin’s politics? Back then, during his dissident years, every critic of the regime was called a fascist, he once said. Today it is similar. Sergei Adamowitsch Kovalev, the last Soviet dissident, died in Moscow on Monday at the age of 91. The news of his death was less than an hour old when Kremlin-loyal trolls flooded the Internet with malice.