Obituary: Lyudmila Alexeyeva died on December 9th

SINCE THE phone had been clamouring all day with people offering congratulations on her 90th birthday, Lyudmila Alexeyeva was hardly surprised to receive an official message at her Moscow flat. She was much more surprised to see walking in, smooth-faced and smiling, Vladimir Putin, with a large bunch of flowers. “I’m grateful to you for all you have done over these many, many years for such a huge number of people in this country,” he said. And sat down on one of her blue armchairs, close and friendly.

He had almost come to pay court to her, the grandmother of the human-rights movement in Russia, as she spryly called herself; a veteran of samizdat, protests, arrests and harassment over 50 years. From the mid-1960s she had held up placards reading “Respect the Soviet Constitution!” Yes, respect the law: what was written, what could be appealed to, against injustice. Back at the start, as she told the president now, she had asked herself how many years of prison, or exile, she would get for it. And once she had co-founded the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) in 1976, to monitor Russia’s compliance with the Helsinki accords, she had indeed been forced into exile for 16 years—until she returned, still fighting. This man who sat facing her, almost knee to knee, looked respectful enough. But she had not stopped agitating since, in 2000, he had come to power. She was not the stopping type!