Sergey Kovalev died

Today, August 9, in Moscow, at the age of 91, human rights activist and dissident Sergey Kovalev died.

It is reported by Radio Liberty *.

Sergei Adamovich Kovalev was born in 1930 in the city of the middle-Bud of the Chernihiv region of the Ukrainian SSR, in 1954 he graduated from the Faculty of Biology of the Moscow State University, worked at the Institute of Biophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, was the head of the department of the laboratory of mathematical methods in biology. The author of more than 60 scientific works, candidate of biological sciences (1964).

In 1966, at the Institute of Biophysics, the collection of signatures under the appeal in defense of Andrei Sinyavsky and Julia Daniel, convicted under the article on anti -Soviet agitation for the publication of literary works abroad. Since 1968, he actively participated in human rights traffic, in 1969 he became part of the initiative group of human rights in the USSR - the first independent public human rights association in the country. In the same year he was forced to leave Moscow State University.

Since 1971, he was one of the main participants in the publication of the information bulletin of the Soviet human rights defenders of the “Chronicle of current events”. In December 1974, Kovalev was arrested on charges of anti -Soviet agitation and sentenced to seven years in maximum security camps and three years of exile.

He served the term in the Perm camps and in the Chistopol prison, the link in the Magadan region, after which he lived in Kalinin (now Tver). In 1987, he returned to Moscow and, on the recommendation of Andrei Sakharov, became the co -chairman of the design group for human rights under the International Foundation “For the Survival and Development of Humanity”.

He participated in the creation of the public Club, in the Constituent Congress of the Memorial Society*, in 1990 became one of its co-chairs. He headed the Human Rights Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, was a deputy of the State Duma of the first three convocations, the first authorized person on Russian rights, chairman of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights.

He played a leading role in the development of the second chapter of the Russian Constitution “Rights and Freedom of Man and Citizen”, as well as a number of federal laws affecting the problems of human rights, on the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions, about the emergency, about refugees and forced immigrants.

He was an opponent of the war in Chechnya. In 1995, he headed a group of negotiators who negotiated the liberation of hostages captured by Shamil Basayev militants in a hospital in Budennovsk. As a result of negotiations, all the hostages were released, surviving at that time.

He was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor and other state awards of different countries.

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