May 17

Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya was born on May 17, 1950, Baranavichy, Belorussian SSR, USSR) is a liberal Russian politician, Soviet dissident, the founder and the chairwoman of the "Democratic Union" party, and a member of the editorial board of The New Times. Many of her remarks have provoked controversy.

Career

Soviet Union

Novodvorskaya has been active in the Soviet dissident movement since her youth, and first imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in 1969 for distributing leaflets that criticized the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia (Prague Spring). The leaflets included her poetry: "Thank you, the Communist Party for our bitterness and despair, for our shameful silence, thank you the Party!". Novodvorskaya was only 19 at this time. She was arrested and imprisoned at Soviet psychiatric hospital with diagnosis of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia, just like many other Soviet dissidents. In the early 1990s, psychiatrists of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia proved that the claim of mental illness was bogus. She described her experience in psikhushka in her book "Beyond Despair".

Russia

Political career

Novodvorskaya stood as a candidate for the radical liberal party Democratic Union in the 1993 Russian legislative election in a single-mandate district as part of the Russia's Choice bloc, and she also contested the 1995 Russian legislative election on the list of the Party of Economic Freedom. She was not elected in either election, and hasn't yet held public office.

Political activism

Novodvorskaya self-identifies as democratic and liberal politician. She also sometimes calls herself and her allies successors to the Russian White movement tradition. She is openly critical of Russian government policies, including Chechen Wars, domestic policies of Vladimir Putin, and the alleged rebirth of Soviet propaganda in Russia.

In an interview with Echo Moskvy, in which she was discussing the 2008 South Ossetia War, Novodvorskaya said that Shamil Basayev was a democrat, given his support of Boris Yeltsin during the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt and his participation in the government of Aslan Maskhadov in 1997, who had appointed Basayev Deputy Premier of the Ichkerian government. According to her, it was Russian governmental policies in Chechnya that turned Basayev into a terrorist. In response, Alexey Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of the radio station, pulled the recording and transcripts of the program from the Echo Moskvy website. She later accused Venediktov of censorship and slander and suggested that the decision to remove the interview may have been due to Gazprom, a state-owned company, being a controlling shareholder in Echo Moskvy. Venediktov asserted this to be his own decision and confirmed that Novodvorskaya was banned from the station until the end of 2008.

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