“I didn’t want to be ashamed in front of my children” – human rights activists recall Sergei Kovalev

Alexander Cherkasov, Chairman of the Board of the International “Memorial”

Sergei Kovalev is a man of renaissance scale and encyclopedic knowledge. He could speak competently about various things. Biological scientist, worked at the university in the laboratory of Israel Moiseevich Gelfand. With his tediousness and thoroughness, he organically blended into the human rights movement, while becoming not a ringleader, not a demonstrator, but an editor of the Chronicle of Current Events. He started doing this in 1969, after the arrest of Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Ilya Gabai. This was the time when scholars changed poets and this style was important for the publication, which was the essence of the dissident movement for 15 years, from 1968 to 1982.

When Kovalev was arrested for the Chronicle, the KGB tried to impute to him the slanderous nature of the publication. We checked over 1000 episodes, in ten we found inaccuracies, significant – in two or four. This is a good indicator for the modern Russian press.

Kovalev went to the camps for 10 years, and then for his rebellious behavior – to the Chistopol prison and, finally, to exile to the Kolyma. This is a whole biography of a prisoner who fought with dignity for the entire period, not broken by blackmail. At the end of his term, Kovalev was blackmailed by the fact that his son Ivan and his daughter-in-law Tatyana Osipova were sitting in the camps.

Soon after the release of Sergei Adamovich, a new time began. In 1988, Kovalev and his comrades met with those who started Memorial. Then “Memorial” helped Kovalev in the elections to the Russian parliament in 1990 and also helped the work of the Human Rights Committee, which Sergei Adamovich headed in the Supreme Soviet. Much has been done here, including prison reform. There was an attempt to somehow influence what is happening in the zones of local conflicts that began on the periphery of the disintegrating USSR, and then in Russia.

Sergei Adamovich was not a cabinet deputy. Everyone heard about what he did in Chechnya. It was Kovalev, who settled in Grozny in December 1994, who reported that Russian aviation was bombing the city, from which civilians did not leave. It was Kovalev who brought the first lists of captured Russian soldiers in January 1995. These are the ones their generals tried to forget. Of course, there was also Budennovsk, where exactly Sergei Kovalev and his team, who worked with him all this time, managed to secure the release of 1,500 hostages in exchange for 150 voluntary hostages, which became Sergei Adamovich and his comrades.

Unfortunately, for all this work, Russia and the USSR awarded him only a prison term, but for Budennovsk he has the Order of the Legion of Honor, where the awarding formula says about the release of the hostages in Budennovsk.

Sergei Adamovich was the chairman of the Russian Memorial for many years. He was our conscience, which responded to any injustice, and a conscience that made us rethink ourselves whether we were acting correctly, leaving no room for complacency and complacency. Sergei Adamovich always said that with the dead as with the living – they also drank clinking glasses for the dead, they remembered them as living. We will also remember Sergei Adamovich as alive.

Lev Ponomarev, Chairman of the For Human Rights Movement

Maybe not everyone says what I am saying about Kovalev. First of all, let us note three circumstances that distinguish him among the Soviet dissidents. This is a man who has fought for freedom all his life. You will not find a single note or article where someone would accuse him of duplicity or weakness. On the contrary, he always fought too hard, too definitely, did not make any concessions. The character is very tough and persistent. He gave up his scientific career in Soviet times, went to the camps. I am close to this environment, but I never went to the square with them. No one ever said that he flinched anywhere. He was a model of perseverance. If something sounded, then they said that he was too uncompromising. Not everyone will talk about the following: when perestroika began and there was a feeling that something could be done, many dissidents did not show themselves to be supporters of perestroika and did not develop these processes. I also doubted, many doubted. Nevertheless, when the opportunity arose to run for deputies of the USSR, and then Gorbachev of Russia announced alternative elections for the first time in our country, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov went to these elections. He was less than a year before his death, starting with the Constituent Congress, but he became the most prominent politician in the interregional parliamentary group. Sakharov believed that it was necessary to engage in politics and understood that compromises were needed. In my presence, Andrei Dmitrievich asked Kovalev: “Are you going to the elections in 1990?”, And Sergei Adamovich said: “I don’t know.” In fact, when I was there, Sakharov persuaded him. I think such conversations have happened more than once, because there were other witnesses that Sakharov tried to persuade Kovalev. And he went to the polls. In this sense, he was different from many of his colleagues.

Sasha Podrabinek wrote passionate articles when Sakharov went to the polls, and he condemned Sakharov’s actions. This was non-standard behavior and, in general, I am very grateful to both Sakharov and Kovalev for their choice. They fundamentally influenced the formation of parliamentarism in Russia at that time. Kovalev headed the Human Rights Committee in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. All draft laws passed through this committee. Moreover, they themselves prepared some draft laws – for example, the Law on Freedom of Conscience. This was the most important committee. And imagine the existence of such a committee now in Russia.

Then it became necessary to help the presidential administration in some way to develop the topic of human rights. He went to Yeltsin’s administration. He was sitting on the Old Square, where the CPSU Central Committee used to be. Then a commission on human rights under President Yeltsin was created – and it worked. He called for help from human rights defenders, human rights defenders traveled to the colonies and so on. Yeltsin was still available to us, the democrats, who supported him. Then there were the elections of the first ombudsman in Russia in 1993-1994. He left Yeltsin because he was trying to stop the war in Chechnya, he went there. He failed to convince Yeltsin, and he resigned. Here was the border of a possible compromise.

We know that Putin was nominated by Yeltsin with the support of the liberal party – the Union of Right Forces. I was with Kovalev at one such meeting. We then sharply spoke out against supporting the colonel of the KGB of the USSR in the presidential elections in Russia. Unfortunately, this did not affect Yeltsin’s position. In the first year of Putin’s presidency, we held the All-Russian Extraordinary Congress for the Defense of Human Rights. It was not accidentally called emergency, because there was a second war in Chechnya. There was a big congress, we cannot hold this now. And there Kovalev made a report, and the resolution we adopted fully predicted the entire tragic dramatic path of Russia over 20 years under Putin. It was necessary to see this, because at the beginning of the 2000s, when Putin came to power and was still dependent on the liberals who surrounded him, he studied, tried to please them, maybe it was more or less tolerant. Then much more remained after the Yeltsin period. Unambiguously then at the congress we said that all this is temporary and the situation will worsen. We predicted it all then.

Already under Putin, the Human Rights Union was created. For personal reasons, I did not go there, but many of my friends are there and they are still there. I find it very useful to be there. And there was Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alekseeva, the second pillar of our human rights movement from that era. Kovalev strongly objected to the participation of human rights defenders in this council. I don’t blame him. Maybe sometimes you have to make some compromises, as Alekseeva did.

Sergey Adamovich laid the foundation. There are now people at Memorial 20 years younger than Kovalev. I hope that Memorial will continue to work and survive this loss, preserve its activity and efficiency. I have always been a supporter of Kovalev. Sometimes they only tried to persuade him not to be too tough with the Moscow Helsinki Group. We will continue this work. No one can replace him, but collectively, I hope, we will all be Sergei Adamovich.

Sergey Lukashevsky, Executive Director of the Sakharov Center

Sergei Adamovich, speaking of Sakharov, called him the paladin of the mind. Kovalev himself also wants to be called a paladin. He was a very chivalrous and warlike man in the noblest sense of the word. In this respect, it was not easy with him. He was a man in some way consistent and in some way even tough. At the same time, even when we were arguing with him, and I, despite the difference in age, allowed myself to discuss with him on some things, his tough principled position was always a very important tuning fork, some feature from which it was important to build on …

He defended human rights and, in some way, human life, but at the same time he was an avid hunter, and this always became the subject of controversy and jokes, which he endured with the same firmness with which he defended some important principles for himself. Everyone was always amazed at how it could be combined in him. I think that it could be part of this his severity and firmness, which allowed him to remain himself and survive during the period of exile.

I also always remember the very simple words that he said about his motivation to become a dissident and to fight the Soviet regime at the risk of his life. He said a very simple thing: “I do not want to be ashamed.” The global goals and ideas were small, although he wrote a lot and thought about human rights as a unifying idea. “I didn’t want to be ashamed in front of my children. If I don’t sign this letter and do not act as my conscience dictates, how can I look my own children in the eyes? ”- so he said. It is a simple yet deep motivation that aroused great respect and admiration. It was very simple and very deep at the same time.

Sergei Davidis, Member of the Council of the Human Rights Center “Memorial”

The example of Sergei Adamovich and his associates to some extent inspires us at this time. Their situation was much more difficult and difficult. They did not have such reasons to hope for changes, that they will see the fruits of their labors, as one would like to hope we have now. We understand that this is temporary, that it is unnatural, that this is such a sad dramatic situation in the history of our Motherland, which cannot and should not last long, while at that time the Soviet government declared its eternity and no expectations that it is during the life of a generation. collapse was not. Sergei Adamovich is quoted in the obituary, which was published by the human rights center “Memorial”, and there he spoke about the marathon distance and what would be fine if the result was even after 300 years. He managed to see with his own eyes and do something important and necessary for the already non-communist Russia. Now we are again in a very dramatic human rights situation, but there is much more hope. The example of Sergei Adamovich, his victory and the victories of other human rights defenders in this seemingly impossible struggle gives strength in this situation.