Sofia Kalistratova
Encyclopedia
Public defender
The term public defender is primarily used to refer to a criminal defense lawyer appointed to represent people charged with a crime but who cannot afford to hire an attorney in the United States and Brazil. The term is also applied to some ombudsman offices, for example in Jamaica, and is one way...
in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. She defended various Soviet dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
s and from 1977 was a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group
Moscow Helsinki Group
The Moscow Helsinki Group is an influential human rights monitoring non-governmental organization, originally established in what was then the Soviet Union; it still operates in Russia....
(MHG), distributing information about human rights violations in the Soviet Union.
Born in the town of Rylsk
Rylsk
Rylsk is a town and the administrative center of Rylsky District of Kursk Oblast, Russia, located on the right bank of the Seym River southwest of Kursk. Population: 19,000 .-History:...
, she graduated from the Moscow State University, specializing in the field of law. Unable to find a position in prosecutor's office, she began her activity as public defender at the Moscow College of Advocates (Московская Коллегия адвокатов). According to rumors, in the 1960s, the officer who was issuing her with a new passport, misspelled the last name "Kallistratova" as "Kalistratova". Sofiya did not make a big deal out of it and signed the documents as Kalistratova ever since.
She joined the Moscow Helsinki Group
Moscow Helsinki Group
The Moscow Helsinki Group is an influential human rights monitoring non-governmental organization, originally established in what was then the Soviet Union; it still operates in Russia....
as a legal consultant. The KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
searched Kalistratova's apartment several times and confiscated typewriters and documents. Some of Kalistratova's friends were arrested. The activity of the Moscow Helsinki Group
Moscow Helsinki Group
The Moscow Helsinki Group is an influential human rights monitoring non-governmental organization, originally established in what was then the Soviet Union; it still operates in Russia....
become impossible, while the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov
Yuri Andropov
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later.-Early life:...
, was making his career out of the repression of dissidents. Supporters claim that all their work defending the human right to obtain, discuss, and distribute information was legal.
As with many other defenders of human rights, she was accused of anti-Soviet activity
Anti-Sovietism
Anti-Sovietism and Anti-Soviet refer to persons and activities actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.Three different flavors of the usage of the term may be distinguished....
(more precisely by article 190-1 of the Code of USSR, distribution of presumably wrong opinions which defame the Soviet government and public order. The case against her started in 1981 was dropped, with reasons for discontinuing, but Sofiya insisted in her innocence, and the formula was changed and reported as absence of any criminal element in her activity.
During perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
and glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
, material regarding violations of the law between 1917 and 1985 were published in the mass media. The popular question of correspondents of newspapers was: "In your family, how have your views on the politics of the Soviet Union changed since Glasnost?", and the relatives of Kalistratova could answer: Our point of view did not change during this glasnost. That time, various literators used to say "We did not know" about the period 1917–1986, and, especially, about the Brezhnev stagnation
Brezhnev stagnation
The Era of Stagnation, also known as Brezhnev stagnation or the Stagnation Period, refers to a period of economic stagnation under the rules of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko in the history of the Soviet Union which started in the mid-1970s.-Terminology:Various authors...
(1966–1985). She usually replied: "You are lying. You do not look like an idiot. You DID know, but you were afraid to talk about it."
Death
She died in 1989 and was interred in Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. For her activism, she was awarded the medal of the Guild of Russian Advocates. In 2003, a book about her life was published.External links
- New York Times article, 29 July 1985
- Moscow Helsinki Group website (in Russian)
- Софья Васильевна Каллистратова (in Russian)