Valeriya Novodvorskaya

"By their whining, their linguistic dullness, their nostalgia for the USSR, their love for red flags Russians from Estonia and Latvia proved that they can't have equal rights when entering the European civilization. They are kept by a close stool—and rightly so...Personally I'm fed up with human rights. There was a time when me, CIA, United States used this idea as a ram to destroy the Communist regime and collapse the USSR. This idea served its purpose, so stop lying about human rights and human rights activists before we chop off the limb of the tree we are sitting on".

"Manic depression—so that's what they call "the Russian miracle" and "the Russian soul"! That's why we are so good at war! Unhealthy aggression of a maniac masterfully aimed at aliens by our own rulers that turns into a slavish prostration after the return from war!...Our president should either give us weapons and start a new fight, or lend us a skete big enough for 10 million free people who would rather explode or burn themselves down than live side by side with the triumphant red-brown majority".

"And if we have to destroy the whole country together with all its population in order to free the Earth from communists, fascists and imperialists—we won't chicken and bless our own doom. Some centuries ago our ancestors burned down Moscow so that our enemy wouldn't get it. Today we have all means to make it so that our enemy won't get Russia. Being dead is better than being red".

On 12 July 2014, Novodvorskaya died of toxic shock syndrome, which arose from phlegmon of the left foot.

Novodvorskaya also accused the Russian government of murdering Polish president Lech Kaczyński in a plane crash on 10 April 2010 in Smolensk Oblast.

In 2009 Novodvorskaya published an autobiographical book, Farewell of Slavianka. A Thriller, that includes all the articles from Novy Vzglad, the case details, fragments of speech given by her lawyer Henri Reznik in 1996 and her last word in court. The case lasted for two years and was apparently closed.

In an interview with the Russian radio station Ekho 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 1997 in the government of Aslan Maskhadov, who 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 Ekho Moskvy website. Novodvorskaya later accused Venediktov of censorship and slander and suggested that the decision to remove the interview may have been because Gazprom, a state-owned company, is a controlling shareholder in Ekho Moskvy. Venediktov asserted that it was his own decision and confirmed that Novodvorskaya was banned from the station until the end of 2008.

Opponents accused Novodvorskaya of expressing Russophobic views. On 27 January 1995, the Office of the Prosecutor General launched a Novodvorskaya Case in reaction to an interview she have Estonian journalists on 6 April 1994, and several publications in the Novy Vzglyad newspaper. All materials were checked for "propaganda of civil war", "of inferiority of people based on their ethnicity" and "incitement to hatred". Some of the scandalous quotes include:

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 also contested the 1995 Russian legislative election on the list of the Party of Economic Freedom. She was not elected in either election, and never held public office.

In 1990 Novodvorskaya was baptized by the noncanonical Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church Reunited. She belonged to that church till her death while remaining highly critical of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to her priest Yakov Krotov, "she was more of a Christian than I ever was".

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. The leaflets included her poetry: "Thank you, the Communist Party for our bitterness and despair, for our shameful silence, thank you the Party!" She was arrested and imprisoned at a Soviet psychiatric hospital and, like many other Soviet dissidents, diagnosed with "sluggish schizophrenia". In the early 1990s, psychiatrists of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia proved that the claim of her mental illness was bogus. She described her experience in her book Beyond Despair.

Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya (Russian: Валерия Ильинична Новодворская , 17 May 1950, Baranovichi, Byelorussian SSR – 12 July 2014, Moscow) was a Soviet dissident, writer and liberal politician. She was the founder and the chairwoman of the Democratic Union party and a member of the editorial board of The New Times.

Novodvorskaya was born in 1950 to a Jewish engineer, Ilya Borisovich (Boruchovich) Burshtyn, and a pediatrician, Nina Feodorovna Novodvorskaya, who came from a noble Russian family. Her parents divorced in 1967; Ilya Borisovich later emigrated to North America.

Throughout her life, Novodvorskaya lived in a flat with her mother Nina Fyodorovna (Нина Федоровна Новодворская, 1928–2017), a pediatrician, and cat Stasik. In the summers they rented a dacha in Kratovo. She was fond of swimming, science fiction, theater and cats.