16 Facts About Marina Salye

Marina Yevgenyevna Salye was a Russian geologist and politician, being the former deputy of the legislative assembly of Leningrad.

Marina Salye was a people's deputy in the Congress of People's Deputies of the RSFSR until September 1993, when the congress was dissolved.

Marina Salye was known as an engaging leader and to have been first to accuse Vladimir Putin of corruption, during her tenure with the Leningrad City Council in the mid-1990s.

In March 2010 Marina Salye signed the online anti-Putin manifesto of the Russian opposition "Putin must go".

Marina Salye was born into a distinguished St Petersburg family, and her great-great-grandfather was a watchmaker to the tsar.

Marina Salye earned a doctorate of geology and became a research scientist at Leningrad's Institute of Geology until 1990.

Marina Salye studied rocks across the Soviet Union, but during Mikhail Gorbachev's attempted political openness, or glasnost, in the late 1980s, Salye rose as a leader of a new group of democratic activists.

Marina Salye co-founded Inter-Regional Association of Democratic Organizations, a national association of groups in support of the Inter-Regional Deputies Group that was led in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies by Boris Yeltsin, Andrei Sakharov, and others.

Marina Salye created her own organization and a coalition around it to advocate for a Constituent Assembly, but these efforts were neutralized by the Yeltsin administration, including though its own constitutional consultative assembly and the eventual imposition of a new constitution via referendum in 1993.

In March 2010 Marina Salye gave an interview to Radio Liberty.

In 1992, Marina Salye headed a special commission in St Petersburg, which found that on the basis of documents signed by Vladimir Putin, then chairman of the city's Foreign Relations Committee, and his deputy, the city had exported rare earth metals, oil products, and other raw materials for over 100 million dollars.

Marina Salye suspected that Putin and his deputy had granted the export permits to companies that disappeared after receiving the materials.

Marina Salye began an inquiry into the misappropriation that was approved by the city council for prosecutors to investigate Putin.

Marina Salye spoke out in the media against Putin's candidacy in the presidential elections of 2000 and endorsed Konstantin Titov.

In interviews, Marina Salye feared Putin's power and her friends' mysterious deaths.

Marina Salye died from a heart attack on 21 March 2012.