(b. July 20, 1927, Yevpatoria, Crimea, Ukraine)
Historian, editor, human rights defender, and public figure. A founding member and current chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Author of the first fundamental study on the history of dissent in the USSR.
Lyudmila Alekseeva (née Slavinskaya). Her father was an economist who was killed at the front in 1942. During the Great Patriotic War, she completed nursing courses and tried to volunteer for the front, but was not accepted due to her age. From 1945 to 1950, she was a student at the history faculty of Moscow University. She was an active Komsomol member (during the evacuation, she worked as a technical secretary in the district committee of the Komsomol and, as part of a Komsomol recruitment drive, participated in the construction of the Moscow Metro). After graduating from MSU, she taught history at a vocational school in Moscow (1950–1953) and was also a freelance lecturer for the regional Komsomol committee. In 1952, she joined the CPSU.
From 1953 to 1956, she was a postgraduate student at the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics. From 1959 to 1968, she worked as a science editor in the archeology and ethnography department of the "Nauka" publishing house. From 1970 to 1977, she was a researcher at the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
After Stalin's death and the exposure of Beria (1953), she experienced an ideological crisis: "I came to believe that a gang of bandits was in power." At that time, she refused a full-time position in the Komsomol apparatus and decided not to defend her dissertation. From 1956, the apartments of Alekseeva and her friends, the couple Boris Shragin and Natalia Sadomskaya, became centers for Moscow's intelligentsia to gather, store, and distribute samizdat. In the 1950s and 60s, she met future dissidents: Alexander Volpin (Yesenin), Yury Gastev (in 1968, she married his friend and associate Nikolai Williams), Yuli Daniel and Larisa BOGORAZ, and Anatoly Yakobson.
Beginning with the Sinyavsky-Daniel affair (September 1965 – February 1966), she became involved in the human rights movement. She was one of the initiators of the unofficial "Red Cross," which collected material aid for political prisoners and their families.
She participated in the petition campaign surrounding the GINZBURG-Galanskov trial, signed three letters in their defense, and collected signatures. In April 1968, she was expelled from the CPSU and fired from her job for these activities.
From 1968 to 1972, she participated in the publication of the bulletin “Chronicle of Current Events” (CCE), retyping its editorial copy. She maintained contact with CCE correspondents in Ukraine. She retyped the manuscript of A. Marchenko’s memoirs “My Testimony” and A. SAKHAROV’s “Reflections on Progress...” Alekseeva’s signature appears on many human rights appeals from 1968-75; she was directly and personally involved in the preparation of some of them.
From 1968, she was repeatedly subjected to searches and interrogations, which became particularly intense during the investigations into the Yakir-Krasin case; however, she did not provide the testimony the KGB wanted. In 1974, Alekseeva was issued a warning under the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 25, 1972, for the "systematic production and dissemination of anti-Soviet works."
In 1975 and 1976, she participated in press conferences in Moscow dedicated to the Day of the Political Prisoner in the USSR (October 30).
In early 1976, she agreed to Yury ORLOV’s proposal to join the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) he was forming, and, in the event of emigration from the USSR, to become its foreign representative. She edited and stored MHG documents. She signed the first nineteen documents of the Group and participated in drafting MHG document No. 3 on the conditions of detention for prisoners of conscience (June 17, 1976). On behalf of the MHG, she traveled to Lithuania on matters concerning persecuted Catholic priests and religious schoolchildren; based on the trip, she drafted MHG document No. 15 on December 8, 1976 (which was also signed by Lithuanian Helsinki Group member Tomas Venclova).
Shortly before the start of the repressive campaign against the Helsinki Groups in the USSR, Alekseeva was allowed to leave the country. On February 9, 1977, the last press conference of MHG chair Y. ORLOV before his arrest took place at her apartment.
On February 22, 1977, Alekseeva left the USSR with her family. She settled in the United States. In addition to serving as the foreign representative of the MHG (from 1977 to 1984, she prepared a complete edition of the Group’s documents and published a documentary collection on the case of Y. Orlov), she was a consultant for various human rights organizations ("Human Rights Watch Helsinki," the "Free Trade Union Institute” of the AFL-CIO). From 1977, she hosted human rights programs on radio stations “Radio Liberty” and “Voice of America.” She was published in the newspapers "Novoye Russkoye Slovo," "Novosti," "Russkaya Mysl," in the magazines "Novyy Amerikanets," “Kontinent,” "SSSR. Vnutrenniye protivorechiya," as well as in the British and American press.
From 1977 to 1980, at the request of the US State Department, she wrote a handbook on the currents in Soviet dissent, using many sources. She later reworked this handbook into a monograph, which was published in 1984 under the title "The History of Dissent in the USSR: The Newest Period," and was translated into English a year later. The first chapter in it is “The Ukrainian National Movement.” This book became the first historical study on the subject (republished in Russia in 1992, edited by the head of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group Yevhen Zakharov, and again in 2001 and 2006). In the second half of the 1980s, she was a member of the US delegation at OSCE conferences (Reykjavik, Paris). In 1990, her memoirs, "The Thaw Generation," were published in English (published in Russian in 2006).
She returned to Russia in 1993, and since May 1996, she has been the chair of the restored MHG. From November 1998 to November 2004, she was the President of the International Helsinki Federation. She is a member of the executive committee of the supervisory board of the “Open Society” Institute (Russia).
Bibliography:
Istoriya inakomysliya v SSSR: Noveyshiy period [The History of Dissent in the USSR: The Newest Period]. - Benson (Vermont): Khronika, 1984. - 427 p.; Ibid: Vilnius - Moscow: Vest, 1992. - 350 p.; Ibid: English trans. Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights / Alexeyeva L. - Middletown (Conn.): Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1985. - 521 p.; Ibid / Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG). - Moscow: Zatsepa, 2001. - 382 p.; Ibid / Moscow Helsinki Group, 2006. - 384 p.
The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era. - Boston; Toronto; London: Little, Brown, 1990. - 340 p. - With P. Goldberg.
Iki 1976 metų man neteko…: [Memories of the LHG] // Lietuvos Helsinkio grupė [= The Lithuanian Helsinki Group] / Sud. V. Petkus, Z. Rackauskaite, M. Uoka; Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras. - Vilnius: LGGRTC, 1999. - pp. 495-500. - (Lietuvos Helsinkio grupės dešimtmečiui… [= The Tenth Anniversary of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group]).
The Movement for the Social-Economic Rights in the Soviet Union // Russia. - 1982. - No. 5/6. - pp. 81-89.
Inakomysliye v SSSR: Opyt stat. analiza [Dissent in the USSR: An Attempt at Statistical Analysis] // SSSR: Vnutr. protivorechiya. - 1983. - No. 8. - pp. 5-61; English trans. Quantitative and Qualitative Characteristics of Soviet Dissent // Russia. - 1983. - No. 7/8. - pp. 114-135.
K voprosu o sotsialnykh protivorechiyakh v SSSR [On the Question of Social Contradictions in the USSR] // SSSR: Vnutr. protivorechiya. - 1984. - No. 9. - pp. 114-136.
Inakomysliye v Latvii [Dissent in Latvia] // SSSR: Vnutr. protivorechiya. - 1985. - No. 12. - pp. 86-105.
Zabastovki v SSSR (Poslestalinskiy period) [Strikes in the USSR (The Post-Stalin Period)] // SSSR: Vnutr. protivorechiya. - 1986. - No. 15. - pp. 80-145.
Obshchestvennyye obyedineniya v SSSR [Public Associations in the USSR] // SSSR: Vnutr. protivorechiya. - 1988. - No. 21. - pp. 37-125.
Sbornik dokumentov Obshchestvennoy gruppy sodeystviya vypolneniyu Khelsinkskikh soglasheniy [Collection of Documents of the Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords] / Comp. L.M. Alekseeva. - Issues 4-8. - New York: Khronika-press, 1978-1984.
Delo Orlova: [Sbornik] [The Orlov Case: [A Collection]] / Comp. L.M. Alekseeva. - New York: Khronika, 1980. - 326 p.
Orlov. 1992. - pp. 160, 188-189, 194, 199-201, 204-205, 212-215, 227, 244, 265, 305, 307.
Daniel. 2000. - See name index.
Lyudmila Alekseeva, Paul Goldberg. Pokoleniye ottepeli [The Thaw Generation] / Trans. from English by Z.E. Samoylova. - Moscow: Zakharov, 2006. - 432 p.
