1 Dec 1942
Born Valery Borshchev. Dissident and human rights activist. Author of the law on public oversight of places of detention. The man who "gave society the keys to the prison."
Human rights protection is not about emotions, it is painstaking work with law and facts.
Was born in Tambov region. My father, a military engineer, was often transferred from garrison to garrison. He went to first grade in Yakutia — he recalled that the village was full of exiles. There were many exiles in Irkutsk, where he studied later—especially Lithuanians. When Stalin died, none of his 10- or 11-year-old classmates cried.
I was a believer from the age of 10 - my grandparents baptized me in the church in Rostov Shakhty.
I became a "fervent anti-Stalinist" during the Thaw. It was then that I experienced a taste of freedom and felt anger toward those who tried to limit it.
We used to walk down Engels Street in Rostov, now Sadovaya Street, and it was called "taking a stroll down Broadway." I had blue trousers, a green Hungarian jacket, and Czech shoes—pitiful clothes by today's standards, but back then, the height of fashion, a challenge. The police would chase us down to cut our trousers because they were too tight.
While still in school, he began writing for the regional newspaper, the Rostov Komsomolets. In 1961, he entered the journalism department at Moscow State University. Moscow was a vibrant intellectual scene—he would come to the dorm to read poetry. Yevtushenko, People went to Mayakovsky Square to listen to poets and dissidents. In 1962, after the publication of the novella "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," one of the teachers addressed the students: "Please stand up, we have a great writer born."
It was then that I realized the power of civic solidarity: together with my classmates, I caught a KGB officer in plagiarism, and he was transferred to correspondence courses; I defended my classmates from expulsion after they attended a rally in defense of Daniel и Sinyavsky.
I wrote my thesis on the topic of social activism - I collected the material in Oryol, After conducting a series of surveys, the regional party committee deemed the resulting articles sedition.
The articles called for the use of all legal means to resist arbitrary action and protect human rights. And they proposed a mechanism for doing so.
He was saved from accusations of anti-Sovietism by Komsomolskaya Pravda – at the request of the scientific director, the newspaper reprinted the material and invited the guy to work in the recently created Boris Grushin Institute of Public Opinion. In 1966, he became a staff member of KP.
In 1974, when the persecution began in the newspaper Solzhenitsyn, Resigned. Worked at the magazine "Soviet Screen."
In 1975 I met Andrei Sakharov. In 1976 - with a dissident priest Gleb Yakunin, Both participated in the creation of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers' Rights. They distributed samizdat and sent news to Western "voices."
In 1978 he left the CPSU, which he joined in 1973.
Leaving the party meant giving up success. Not in the career sense, but in the professional one. Losing my profession. And I lost it.
He worked part-time as a carpenter and painter, but this work was not permanent and he could be prosecuted for parasitism. Valery Zolotukhin helped me get a job as a firefighter at the Taganka Theatre.
On February 8, 1980, he narrowly escaped arrest—he wasn't home when they arrived (all the founders of the Christian Committee were arrested at the time). He went underground for several months, living in an illegal apartment and binding Christian literature.
After perestroika, he became one of the key figures in Russian human rights.
The main focus of his life was the law on public oversight of places of detention. It was passed in 2008. Independent observers were able to visit pretrial detention centers, penal colonies, and prisons, giving prisoners the opportunity to defend their rights.
He served as the chairman of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission for six years. In 2010, he and his colleagues published a report on the death Sergey Magnitsky — was one of the first to speak out about the fact that he could have been killed.
Since 2019, he has been co-chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Russia's oldest human rights organization was liquidated in 2023:
You are committing a grave sin. You are destroying the human rights movement!
Condemned the war with Ukraine.
He died on November 3, 2025. His photo soon appeared on Nemtsov Bridge, along with a letter dedicated to him from a political prisoner. Alexey Gorinov.
