The Irish Times on Saturday carried the obituary of Sergie A Kovalev.
It is an interesting read about a fascinating person.
Sergei Kovalev was born on March 2, 1930 in Seredina Buda, in northeastern Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His family moved to the Podlipki district, near Moscow when he was two.
He was 11 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and 12 during the battle at Stalingrad.
He was opposed to the Soviet system and then went on to campaign against post-communist leaders Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.
At one stage in his life when he was in internal exile, his son Ivan was charged with undermining and weakening the Soviet Union, while his wife Tatiana Osipova was serving out a sentence in a labour camp.
He studied physiology at Moscow State University from 1951 to 1959. During that time he was interviewed by the KGB during which veiled threats were made against his two-year-old son and his then wife Elena Viktorovna.
Kovalev was a founder of the first independent rights group in the Soviet Union.
He spent time in the notorious Perm camp 36 and was in isolation in Magadan, approximately 6,000 kilometres east of Moscow.
Kovalev opposed Yeltsin’s first Chechen war from 1994 to 1996, which was the cause of a fall out between the two men.
Reading the obituary one meets a man who spent his entire life campaigning for what was right and just, whatever the cost.
He was a personal friend of physicist and one time designer of Soviet nuclear weapons Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov, the dissident, became a powerful influence on Kovalev.
During the era of Gorbachev Kovalev was rehabilitated and indeed took a seat in parliament.
In March 1995, parliament voted to dismiss him as Russia’s first human rights commissioner.
Sergei A Kovalev died on August 9, 2021.
So, who and what was Kovalev? A permanent complainer or someone who campaigned to do what was right, just and correct?
A man of outstanding and prophetic courage.
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