| Famous Russian human rights activist Larissa Bogoraz died
in Moscow on
Tuesday. She was 74.
Bogoraz was the wife of the dissident writer Yuli Daniel. When Daliel
was
arrested in 1965 together with another dissident, Andrei Sinyavsky, she
wrote a protest letter to the Prosecutor General of the Soviet Union.
She
was also one of the leaders of the writers' support campaign.
In 1968, she was one of seven people who took part in the demonstration
on
the Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For this,
Bogoraz was arrested and sentenced to four years of exile in the East
Siberian Irkutsk region.
In 1975, Bogoraz wrote an open letter to Yuri Andropov, then the head
of the
KGB secrtet police, demanding the archives of the security committee be
opened. She was also among those who wrote an open letter to the Soviet
authorities protesting against the banishment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In 1986, she, along with other Soviet dissidents, led a campaign for
the
amnesty of political prisoners. In January 1987, the Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev began to free the prisoners - a month after the second husband
of
Larissa Bogoraz, famous HR activist Anatoly Marchenko, died in prison.
She was one of the founders and a co-chairperson of the Moscow Helsinki
Group which she led before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s,
she was a member of the administration of the Russian-American human rights
group project.
The current head of the Helsinki Group, Ludmila Alexeeva has told the
Ekho Moskvi radio station that Larissa Bogoraz was "one of the most
influential figures in the Russian human rights movement. She played a
big role in forming its ideology". Also speaking on the radio station,
the human rights ombudsman Vladimir
Lukin said that Bogoraz was "one of the purest and most honest
symbols of the dissident movement who fought for the freedom of citizens,
their rights, independence, dignity".
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