Cathy Young on the Life and Death of a Russian Freedom Fighter

Valeria Novodvorskaya, the firebrand Russian
activist and writer who died in Moscow on July 12 at the age of 64,
was practically unknown abroad and had a somewhat scandalous
notoriety at home. Enemies derided her, often in crudely misogynist
terms, as a demented Russia-hating hag; even many allies viewed her
as something of an embarrassment, a ridiculous old woman prone to
saying things that made the already marginalized liberal opposition
look crazy. In death, she was quickly and almost literally
canonized by the same opposition. Many said that they were only now
beginning to understand what a great soul had lived in their midst,
and was now gone. “The things we whispered, she said loudly,” wrote
former tycoon and political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. “The
things we were willing to tolerate, she was not.”

There is a certain symbolism, points out Cathy Young, in the
fact that Valeria Novodvorskaya died just as the Putin regime was
being fully exposed as the gangster state that she had always said
it was.

View this article.