Press Release, 22.12.2022

On 21 December, the Yabloko Party University hosted a lecture “Political Idealism: an Illusion or a Reality” by Valery Borshchyov, an outstanding human rights activist, dissident, a member of the Federal Political Committee, Co-Chairman of the Yabloko’s Human Rights Faction and Co-Chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

On 1 December, Valery Borshchyov turned 80. He became an active participant in the Soviet human rights movement after meeting Acad. Andrei Sakharov in 1975.

In 2009, Valery Borshchyov was involved, as a well-known human rights defender and head of the Public Monitoring Commission of Moscow, in clarifying the circumstances of the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a pre-trial detention centre.

Since 2019, Valery Borshchyov has been the Co-Chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the oldest human rights organisation in Russia, which, as announced the day before, will be liquidated by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.

At a lecture at Yabloko, Valery Borshchyov spoke about the views and actions of the dissident movement in the USSR and the methods of political struggle. Answering the question of party Chairman Nikolai Rybakov about what motivated the dissidents to fight every day, Valery Borshchyov said that they were seeking the right to self-respect and freedom, and this was a strong incentive. It helped the dissidents not to feel alone, despite the relatively narrow movement.

According to Valery Borshchyov, it is enough to have a small number of people in society who turn a crowd of people into a civil society.