1. Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya was a Russian and Soviet dissident, writer and liberal politician.
21 Facts About Valeriya Novodvorskaya
1. 2.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya was the founder and the chairwoman of the Democratic Union party and a member of the editorial board of The New Times.
3.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya's parents divorced in 1967; Ilya Borisovich later emigrated to North America.
4.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya was active in the Soviet dissident movement since her youth, and first imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in 1969, when she was 19, for distributing leaflets that criticized the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
5.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya was arrested and imprisoned at a Soviet psychiatric hospital and, like many other Soviet dissidents, diagnosed with "sluggish schizophrenia".
6.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya described her experience in her book Beyond Despair.
7.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya stood as a Democratic Union candidate in the 1993 Russian legislative election in a single-mandate district as part of the Russia's Choice bloc, and she contested the 1995 Russian legislative election on the list of the Party of Economic Freedom.
8.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya was not elected in either election, and never held public office.
9.
In 2009, Valeriya Novodvorskaya published an autobiographical book, Farewell of Slavianka.
10.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya self-identified primarily as a liberal politician and was described by her colleagues as "a critic of Russian realities in the best traditions of Pyotr Chaadayev, Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen".
11.
Aleksandr Dugin, Igor Shafarevich, Sergey Kara-Murza, Yevgeny Dodolev, Vladimir Bushin and a few others accused Valeriya Novodvorskaya of expressing anti-Russian views and condemning Russian history while idealizing Western civilization and the United States.
12.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya strongly opposed the Second Chechen War and Vladimir Putin's domestic and foreign policies.
13.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya accused the Russian government of murdering Polish president Lech Kaczynski in a plane crash on 10 April 2010 in Smolensk Oblast.
14.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya supported Georgia in the Russo-Georgian War and Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War.
15.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya was fond of swimming, science fiction, theater and cats.
16.
In 1990, Valeriya Novodvorskaya was baptized by the non-canonical Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church Reunited.
17.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya belonged to the church until her death while remaining highly critical of the KGB-controlled Russian Orthodox Church.
18.
On 12 July 2014, Valeriya Novodvorskaya died of toxic shock syndrome, which arose from a phlegmon of the left foot.
19.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya received the Galina Starovoitova Award "for contribution to the defense of human rights and strengthening democracy in Russia".
20.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya said at the ceremony that "we are not in opposition to, but in confrontation with, the present regime".
21.
Valeriya Novodvorskaya was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas in 2008.