Russia's most famous human rights activist dies at 91

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a human rights pioneer and dissident who challenged the Soviet and Russian regimes for decades, demanding that they free political prisoners and establish democratic rights, died Saturday in a Moscow hospital, a Russian official said. She was 91.

"She remained a human rights activist to the very end," said Mikhail Fedotov, head of Russia's Human Rights Council. "This is a loss for the entire human rights movement in Russia."

The gentle but courageous activist was born under dictator Josef Stalin's regime. She risked her own freedom to protest the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s and co-founded the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia's oldest human rights organization, in 1976.

FILE - In this file photo taken on Monday, Dec. 18, 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, congratulates the Moscow Helsinki Group Chair and human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, during a ceremony to present the 2017 State Awards for Outstanding Achievements in Human Rights and and Charity Work at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. Alexeyeva, who was forced into exile by Soviet authorities after founding Russia's oldest human rights organization in 1976, passed away in a Moscow hospital Friday, Dec. 7, 2018 at age 91. (Yuri KochetkovPool Photo via AP, File)

Alexeyeva faced death threats throughout her career and was forced into exile by Soviet authorities in 1977.

She returned to Russia in 1993 after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and continued her work energetically, but suspicion of non-governmental organizations under President Vladimir Putin's rule increasingly impeded her activities.

In 2014, she announced that the Moscow Helsinki Group had laid off most of its staff and cut pay for the remainder. The move followed declining foreign donations in the wake of legislation requiring groups receiving such funding to register as "foreign agents."

FILE In this file photo taken on Thursday, March 10, 2011, Vice President of the United States Joe Biden, right, speaks to Russian human right's activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, second right, as he meets with Russian Civil Society leaders in Moscow, Russia. Alexeyeva, who was forced into exile by Soviet authorities after founding Russia's oldest human rights organization in 1976, passed away in a Moscow hospital Friday, Dec. 7, 2018 at age 91. (AP PhotoAlexander Zemlianichenko)

Alexeyeva relentlessly pressed Soviet authorities to improve human rights, through times of crushing repression and those of relative tolerance, a job that required enormous patience.

"In Soviet times, we couldn't do anything to defend human rights," she told The Associated Press in a 2009 interview. "We couldn't even defend ourselves. Our activity was confined to proclaiming that the state should respect human rights and defend them."

After the Soviet collapse, she turned into a respectful but insistent voice urging that Russia's newly elected leadership live up to its rhetoric about democracy and the rule of law.

Despite Putin's early patronage, including his naming her to an advisory council, Alexeyeva was a leading critic of Russia's second war in Chechnya, launched in 1999 during Putin's first term as prime minister, and of Putin's weakening of Russia's democratic institutions.

Government officials later accused nongovernment organizations like the Moscow Helsinki Group of spying on Russia for the West, and Alexeyeva became the target of death threats by nationalist groups. Still, she remained determined and optimistic, maintaining her ties to the Kremlin.

"I don't accuse, I explain," she said. "I say, 'You don't agree? We will speak some more.'"

While she was certain that Russia would one day embrace Western-style democracy, she did not expect that it would happen soon.

"I won't live to see Russia become a democratic state with the rule of law," she told the AP.

Still, Putin made a house call to Alexeyeva on her 90th birthday last year, complete with a champagne toast.

In the early 2000s, Alexeyeva privately urged Putin to halt plans to expel thousands of Chechen refugees from camps in the neighboring region of Ingushetia and force them to return to their war-ravaged homeland.

"He agreed, the camps existed for two years after that and the people lived in camps rather than under bombs," she said.

In December 2008, Putin proposed legislation that would have significantly broadened the definition of treason. Rights activists said the law would make anyone critical of the government liable to prosecution as an enemy of the state. After an outcry by Alexeyeva and others, the proposal was withdrawn.

But Alexeyeva and her allies lost at least as many battles as they won.

After the December 2003 parliamentary election — a watershed vote that saw most of Russia's liberal opposition leadership driven from parliament — Alexeyeva recalled bluntly telling Putin: "We don't have elections anymore, because the results are decided by the bosses and not the people."

Born in Crimea on July 20, 1927, Alexeyeva studied archaeology at Moscow State University. She was drawn into the dissident movement during the Khrushchev thaw, the period of relaxed censorship under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s and early 1960s.

She was part of the small but determined circle of Moscow dissidents that included Sergei Kovalyov, a biologist who survived a gulag labor camp, and physicist Andrei Sakharov, who won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. The dissidents often met but seldom talked about their illegal political activities, working in secret cells to deter arrests.

In the early 1970s, Alexeyeva worked on the Chronicle of Current Events, the most important of the dissident underground journals typed up on onionskin sheets backed by carbon copy paper and circulated hand-to-hand.

One night Alexeyeva grew worried as she waited in a friend's apartment for a courier to deliver the latest edition of the Chronicle for retyping. When a knock came at the door, she hid, certain it was the KGB, before hearing the voice of fellow dissident Kovalyov. Until that moment, she said, she didn't know he was one of the journal's editors.

Kovalyov later spent seven years in a Soviet labor camp for his role in the publication.

Like other dissidents, including author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Alexeyeva was threatened with arrest unless she left the Soviet Union. The mother of two fled with her younger son, Mikhail, in 1977, eventually settling in the United States. There, she co-wrote about her life in "The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era" and also wrote a book called "Soviet Dissent."

In the 2009 interview, Alexeyeva recalled how Russia had changed since her dissident days. One major watershed, she said, was the 1976 Helsinki agreement, which introduced the concept of human rights to the world.

"Now every policeman knows what human rights means," Alexeyeva said. "He doesn't enforce them, but he knows. That is why I think that today is much easier for us than in the Soviet times."

Many liberal Russian have blamed the country's leaders for steering Russia toward authoritarianism. But Alexeyeva said Russia's problem wasn't its leaders, it was its weak society, which she said was incapable of holding leaders to account.

"I don't think the leaders of Western democracies are really such strong democrats," she said, but added that Western leaders have to support human rights and the rule of law or risk being voted out.

Alexeyeva said she often received death threats — and sometimes wondered if she dismissed them too lightly.

She recalled having tea in her kitchen in 2008 with Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer who represented Chechen families with grievances against the government. Markelov said someone was threatening his life, but Alexeyeva tried to be reassuring.

"I told him we all get them," she said, her eyes misting.

Markelov, however, was shot and killed on a snowy Moscow street in January 2009 along with Anastasia Baburova, a young journalist.

Still, Alexeyeva said neither she nor her colleagues would give up their human rights cause.

"I don't know of a single person who works with me who would stop doing what they are doing because of threats," she said. "If I stopped what I am doing now, life wouldn't be interesting to me."

She is survived by her two sons, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Former Cypriot President George Vassiliou, a successful businessman who helped to energize his divided island's economy and set it on the road to European Union membership, has died. He was 94.

Vassiliou died Wednesday after being hospitalized on Jan. 6 for a respiratory infection. Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides praised Vassiliou as a leader who became synonymous with the country's economic prosperity, social progress and push toward modernization.

“Cyprus has lost a universal citizen who broadened our homeland's international imprint,” Christodoulides said in a written statement.

His wife Androulla, a lawyer who twice served as a European commissioner, posted on X in the early hours Wednesday that her companion of 59 years “slipped away quietly in our arms” in hospital.

“It's difficult to say farewell to a man who was a superb husband and father, a man full of kindness and love for the country and its people,” she wrote.

When he became president in 1988, Vassiliou lifted hopes that a peace deal with the island's breakaway Turkish Cypriots was possible after more than a decade of off-again, on-again talks. He swiftly relaunched stalled reunification negotiations with Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, but they ended at an impasse that continues today.

Cyprus was split into an internationally recognized Greek-speaking south and a Turkish-speaking north in 1974, when Turkey invaded the island after a coup aimed at uniting it with Greece. A Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence nine years later was recognized only by Turkey.

During an interview in 1989, one year into his five-year term as president, Vassiliou said: "The only dangerous thing for the Cyprus issue is to remain ... in a vacuum, forgotten and with no one taking any interest."

But Vassiliou succeeded on many other fronts, using his skills as a successful entrepreneur to modernize and expand his county’s economy, even though he had been raised by parents who were pro-communist.

Vassiliou was born in Cyprus in 1931 to two doctors who were activists and volunteered their services to the communist forces during the civil war that engulfed Greece in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

With the defeat of the communists in Greece in 1949, the Vassiliou family moved to Hungary and later Uzbekistan.

George Vassiliou initially studied medicine in Geneva and Vienna, but he later switched to economics, earning a doctorate from the University of Economics in Budapest.

After a brief stint doing marketing in London, Vassiliou returned to Cyprus in 1962, and he began a successful business career that made him a millionaire. He founded the Middle East Market Research Bureau, a consultancy business that grew to have offices in 30 countries in the Middle East, South Africa, eastern and central Europe.

In 1987, Vassilou was elected president of Cyprus as an independent entrepreneur who also was supported by the island's powerful communist party AKEL, which his father had one been a prominent member of.

Vassiliou bucked the staid political culture of the time by making the presidency more accessible to the public and visiting government offices and schools. That prompted some criticism that he was turning the presidency into a marketing pulpit.

"I consider it the president’s obligation to come in contact with the civil service," Vassiliou told Greek state TV. "I call this communication with youth. Some call it marketing. ... I call it the proper execution of the president's mission."

He also pushed through key reforms, including imposing a sales tax while slashing income taxes, streamlining a cumbersome civil service, establishing the first Cyprus university, and abolishing a state monopoly in electronic media. To make sure the world better understood the Cyprus peace process, he widely expanded a network of press offices at Cypriot diplomatic missions.

Through his tenure, the island's per capita gross domestic product almost doubled, culminating in possibly his most notable achievement as president — applying for full membership to the European Union, a goal achieved 13 years later.

Vassiliou lost the presidency in 1993 to Glafcos Clerides, who appointed his rival as Cyprus' chief negotiator with the EU in 1998. A decade later, Vassiliou headed a Greek Cypriot team negotiating EU matters during reunification talks. He remained politically active, founding a party of his own and being elected to the Cypriot legislature in 1996.

He authored several books on EU issues and Cypriot politics; was a member of several international bodies, including the Shimon Peres Institute of Peace; and received honors and decorations from countries such as France, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Egypt.

Apart from his wife, Vassiliou is also survived by two daughters and a son.

FILE -Democratic Presidential Candidate Bill Clinton, left, meets with President George Vassiliou of Cyprus at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Aug. 9, 1992. (AP Photo/Mario Cabrera, File)

FILE -Cyprus President George Vassiliou, left, smiles as his son Evelthon, 17, is introduced to the daughter of Massachusetts Governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis, Kara, 19, at the Statehouse in Boston on Aug. 3, 1988 as Dukakis, second from right looks on, during a visit by the Cyprus President to Boston. (AP Photo/Carol Francavilla, File)