Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights

Ludmilla Alexeyeva was born in Crimea on July 20, 1927. She was a leader of the Russian human rights movement in the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, she was a typist for a samizdat journal called the Chronicle of Current Events. In 1976, she co-founded the Moscow Helsinki Group, a pioneering human rights organization that lead to her exile from the country. She moved to the United States, where she wrote two books entitled The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era and Soviet Dissent. She returned to her homeland 16 years later, after the Soviet breakup. She continued to fight for human rights in the era of President Vladimir V. Putin. Alexeyeva died on December 8, 2018 at the age of 91.