Defending Human Rights in Russia

Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969-2003

Emma Gilligan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415546119
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134348497
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Sergei Kovalyov is a central figure in the struggle for human rights in Russia. He was a leading Soviet biology academic and, in the 1970s after becoming active in dissident circles, was arrested by the KGB, tried, imprisoned and subjected to internal exile. After his release, he continued to work for human rights, eventually becoming chairman of the Soviet Human Rights Committee and chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission, in which positions he was extremely influential in framing human rights provisions in post-Communist Russia. He subsequently took President Yeltsin to task for human rights failings, eventually resigning in protest. This book, by tracing Kovalyov's political career, shows how human rights developed in Russia in late Soviet and post Soviet times.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Basees/Routledgecurzon Series on Russian and East European Studies
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Dissidentstvo
• 2: The Dissident Nomenklatura
• 3: The Supreme Soviet Human Rights Committee
• 4: The Presidential Human Rights Commission
• 5: The Chechen War 1994–96
• 6: Troubling Times
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Public Defence of the Rights of the Individual: Resolution No. 1
• Appendix 2: Public Defence of the Rights of the Individual: Resolution N0. 2
• Appendix 3: Results from the Juridical Section of the Human Rights Seminar, December 1988
• Bibliography