OTHER CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS

Women worked as well in civic organizations advocating for environmental conservation and human rights. Of the latter groups, one of the largest was the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers; it was also the largest women’s civic organization. Founded in 1989 to protest the brutal treatment of draftees in the Soviet army, it grew into a network of committees spread across Russia and Ukraine and coordinated by a national board headquartered in Moscow. “They [the local committees] were born of maternal love,” the committee declared on its website, “of a refusal to accept violence, and of a strong sense of civic responsibility.” The soldiers’ mothers lobbied the government for army reforms, advised parents of draftees on their legal rights, and even, on occasion, sheltered AWOL soldiers. They set up a website that published investigations of beatings and other abuse. The committees protested the war in Chechnya and publicized the war’s horrors. They helped the mothers of soldiers who were imprisoned in Chechnya to travel to the area to plead for their sons’ release. All this activism earned the committees widespread public support in Russia and Ukraine and inspired the formation of other groups, including the Mothers of Beslan, which sought to uncover the truth about the botched attempt to free the hostages taken by Chechen terrorists in the school siege of September 2004.⁴⁰

LIUDMILA ALEXEEVA (b. 1927)

Most human‑rights organizations were led by men, but there was one important exception: Helsinki Watch Moscow, set up by dissidents in the 1970s. In 1996, it invited Liudmila Alexeeva, one of its founders, to become its head. Two years later she was elected president of the International Helsinki Federation on Human Rights. Famous among the intelligentsia as a “legendary dissident and human‑rights defender,” Alexeeva proved to be a forceful critic of the government. She spoke up against the repression and the brutality of the Chechen war. She scorned Yeltsin as “Bloody Boris,” and was just as critical of Putin. At a demonstration on the first anniversary of Anna Politkovskaia’s assassination, Alexeeva declared, “They murdered her because she was fearless. She was fighting against lawlessness, against violence, and against lies.” The octogenarian scoffed at the dangers of being so blunt. “If I were to be killed, no one would say, ‘Oh, what a tragedy, she was cut down so young,’” she told an interviewer in 2007. “But I also think it’s better to go [on] doing what you want.”⁴¹

Alexeeva happily took part in annual rallies held on New Year’s Eve to dramatize the government’s refusal to honor the constitutional guarantee of freedom of assembly. On December 31, 2009, she showed up dressed as the mythic snow maiden, in a sparkling blue gown and white muff. She was quickly arrested and almost as quickly released, because the government wanted to avoid martyring an old woman with an international reputation. It did not escape embarrassment. The U.S. government and the European Parliament promptly condemned the arrest, and a picture of Alexeeva being manhandled by police ran in newspapers across Europe. “If it serves as a lesson to them,” Alexeeva told a New York Times reporter, “I wouldn’t call it a victory, but it would be useful. Whether it will serve as a lesson I can’t say, because they study very badly.”⁴²