In May, Ilya Borisovich Burshtyn died. Novodvorskaya, Valery Ilyinichna. “There were no bedding or clothes in the house”

The father of a Russian oppositionist who died a year ago, 92-year-old Ilya Burshtyn, lives in the United States. Journalist Rahel Gedrich spoke with Ilya Borisovich for the publication "Krugozor" about the childhood years of the future dissident, her first political action, the horrors of punitive psychiatry to which Novodvorskaya was subjected to the USSR authorities, and about relations with her daughter after his departure to the United States

Ilya Borisovich Burshtyn greeted me cordially, showed me the books presented by his daughter, and led me into a cozy bright kitchen-dining room. We talked very sincerely for about two hours, which, thanks to an interesting interlocutor, flew by for me completely unnoticed.

“MY WIFE AND I WANTED A SON, BUT A GIRL WAS BORN - GOOD, HEALTHY”

- Ilya Borisovich, how did you meet Valeria's mother?

- Nina Feodorovna's father - a hereditary nobleman, a very nice person Fedor Novodvorsky - lived in Moscow. Nina came to him from Belarus, where she lived with her mother, and entered the First Medical Institute, where my friend studied. After demobilization in 1947, I entered the radiophysics department of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. So we met Nina Fedorovna and got married in Moscow. And Nina went to give birth to her mother in Baranovichi, on demolition - she was almost removed from the train, but she drove home and a few hours later gave birth to a daughter.

It was May 17, 1950. My wife and I were expecting a son, but a girl was born - fine, healthy ... Soon I passed the summer exams and also came to Belarus to my family, for the first time I took my daughter in my arms. At the end of August, we left Leroux with my grandmother and left for Moscow. I continued to study, and Nina went to work. She was a pediatrician, later worked in the Moscow Department of Health.

We visited our daughter twice a year. Lera's grandmother Marya Vladimirovna loved her very much and devoted much energy to her upbringing. She was strict, but disposed towards me, trusted to walk with Leroy, to ride her daughter on a sled in winter. After Nina Fedorovna and I divorced in 1967, Marya Vladimirovna moved to Moscow and lived with her daughter and granddaughter. I visited them, we talked for a long time. She lived a long, decent life and died when I was already living in America.

- Why did Valeria Ilyinichna bear her mother's surname?

- The time is such ... Jewish surnames were unpopular. The case of pest doctors was already gaining momentum, which in the materials of the investigation bore a frank name: "The case of the Zionist conspiracy in the MGB." The flywheel of the "Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Affairs" was spinning, especially after the assassination of Mikhoels on Stalin's orders in 1948. The relations of the USSR with the newly formed state of Israel were very cool - the reaction of Soviet Jews to the visit of Golda Meir to Moscow was too enthusiastic. Stalin built his tricky plans for the resettlement of all the Jews of the USSR to the Far East.

Is Burshtyn a Jewish surname?

- My parents - Sonya and Boruch - were from Poland, they came to Moscow from Warsaw in 1918. Then they wanted to return, but the Poles organized their own independent state, and the parents remained in Soviet Russia. My older sister and brother were born in Warsaw, and this personal fact greatly interfered with them later, although at the time of their birth Poland was part of the Russian Empire. I did not know my grandparents - they died in the Warsaw ghetto. I only remember how before the war I went to the post office with my father, sent them parcels - already in the ghetto ...

I never hid my Jewishness. The documents always indicated: Ilya Borisovich Burshtyn. And the military ID is the same. What my last name means, I did not know as a child. Already working, I came on a business trip to Vilnius (there were a lot of Poles there then) and heard a phrase that surprised me: “How much is this Burshtyn of yours?”.

It turned out that in translation from Polish “bur-shtyn” means “amber”.

- And how did you get to the front?

In July 1941, he volunteered for the army. He was a signalman, and therefore survived. Now I’m reading about the misadventures of the infantry during that war, and I’m even somehow ashamed to stick out my military merits. The infantrymen, of course, were a hundred times harder.

Where did you end the war?

- He fought on the Third Belorussian Front, ended the war in Koenigsberg (Ilya Borisovich modestly keeps silent about participating in the storming of the city and awarding him a military order).

- Were you injured?

- Not. There were no injuries, he was not taken prisoner. The Lord kept me. I don't know if it's Jewish or Russian, but I kept it.

“FROM CHILDHOOD, LERA WAS A ROMANTIC NATURE, A REBELLION, EVEN AT SCHOOL, I DID SOME STRIKES”

- After the war, you immediately demobilized?

- If only ... Almost two years after the end of hostilities, he served in Rzhev. He was an ordinary signalman, but already at the headquarters of the division, he was demobilized in the fall of 1947. Education allowed me to enter the newly organized Institute of International Relations. I saw an advertisement for recruitment at MGIMO and went to the chief of staff with a request to send me to study. He answered sharply: "You are not subject to enrollment in this institute." At that time I had not heard a lot about national quotas for entering institutes and did not understand - why, what was the matter? I realized later - while processing orders at the headquarters, I came across a neat phrase: "Send to special forces only persons whose nationality corresponds to the republics of the USSR." Alas, Birobidzhan was only the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Therefore, after demobilization, I immediately entered the MPEI - Jews were accepted there. After graduating from the institute, he worked as an engineer.

Here Ilya Borisovich again, out of modesty, supports the official version set out on Wikipedia. In fact, he headed the electronics department at a large Moscow research institute that worked for the defense industry - he participated in the development of Russian air defense systems. And at my request to be photographed in a jacket with medal slats, he only grimaced: “Why? Just to decorate? Is the price of Soviet orders and medals high now? Moreover, the State Duma of Russia plans to deprive those participants of the Great Patriotic War who emigrated from Russia from the right to the veteran pension deserved in battles with Nazi Germany. I don't know if this is true or just a fantasy...

In Moscow, we lived in the VDNH area. Our family was intelligent, but Lera went to the usual, proletarian school. I didn’t like it, several times I offered my wife to transfer my daughter to a good school in the center of Moscow, but Nina Fedorovna was against it. Recently I read the memoirs of Vertinsky's daughter about how her parents sent her and her sister to a pioneer camp for the summer. An interesting thing: the well-bred girls returned home with lice, learned to use foul language.

He gave his daughter to read Solzhenitsyn's story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Lera was not yet 13, but, surprisingly, she perceived everything correctly. From childhood she was a romantic nature, a rebel, even at school she organized some kind of strike. At one time I admired Cuba and Vietnam. She went to the district committee of the Komsomol, asked to be sent to the war in Vietnam as a fighter. She was refused, sent home with an order to come when she learned to shoot. Imagine, for a whole year she got up on Sundays at dawn and went to the shooting ranges. I never learned, with her myopia ...

How did she cope with her parents' divorce?

- Lera was 17 years old when I told her about my decision to divorce Nina Fedorovna. The daughter's reaction was lightning fast: "I'm leaving with you!". I had to persuade her for a long time to stay with her mother, for whom the simultaneous loss of two close people would be a strong blow. I insisted: "Lera, you have to stay." My daughter understood. Relatives of Nina Fedorovna also did not condemn me, we continued to maintain respectful relations with them.

“DECIDED ON HER FIRST SERIOUS ACTION, LERA UNDERSTAND THAT IS RISKING VERY MUCH”

- Why did a young girl from an intelligent family suddenly plunge into the struggle against the Soviet regime so decisively? What was it: recklessness or desperate courage?

“Of course, it was desperate courage. She was a passionate person. Deciding on her first serious action, Lera understood that she was risking a lot. By that time, she had graduated from high school with a silver medal and entered the French department of the prestigious Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages.

Ilya Milstein (a well-known Russian journalist) very accurately noticed this quality of Lera: “Nobility multiplied by fearlessness is a rarity. This physical impossibility to remain silent, which forces a 19-year-old girl to scatter leaflets in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, ruining her career and life, dooming her to a torture regime in a psychiatric hospital. And after liberation, to distribute Samizdat, organize an underground party, an underground trade union ... and finally come out with a poster for a demonstration, it will hardly smell of perestroika and glasnost. “You can go to the square, you dare to go to the square...” - these lines of Alexander Galich decorated the membership card of the Democratic Union - an unprecedented party in which it was a member from the first to the last day. In proud loneliness".

- Valeria Ilyinichna shared her plans with you?

- Unfortunately no. I would try to stop her. But by that time I was already living in a new family, in 1967 a son was born to Lidia Nikolaevna and I began to pay less attention to my daughter. The only thing I remember from the events of the autumn of 1969: before going to the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on December 5, she read me her own poem - very angry, directed against the government, with a reproach against the introduction of tanks into Czechoslovakia.

Thank you party

For all that you have done and are doing,

For our current hate

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For all that is betrayed and sold

For the disgraced Motherland

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For a slave afternoon of double-mindedness,

For lies, betrayal and suffocation

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For all denunciations and informers,

Behind the torches on Prague Square

Thank you party!

For a paradise of factories and apartments,

Built on crimes

In the dungeons of old and today

Broken and black world...

Thank you party

Nights full of despair

For our vile silence

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For our bitter unbelief

In the wreckage of the lost truth

In the coming predawn darkness...

Thank you party

For the weight of the acquired truth

And for future fights shots

Thank you party!

I liked the poem, I praised it. But I really didn’t know, I couldn’t even imagine that Leroy’s sarcastically called “Thank you, party, to you!” will become the text of a leaflet, numerous copies of which my daughter and a few of her friends will boldly drop on the heads of visitors to the premises in which the most important public and political events of the state were held.

Lera and her friends were instantly arrested in the hall of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses and accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR). The daughter was placed in solitary confinement in the detention center in Lefortovo. Daniil Romanovich Lunts, a KGB colonel who headed the diagnostic department at the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry named after Serbsky, began to come to her often, which was engaged in examining Soviet dissidents. Daniil Lunts, together with the director of the institute, Georgy Vasilyevich Morozov, were the most famous representatives of the criminal practice of using psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR, followers of the concept of “sluggish (asymptomatic) schizophrenia” rejected by the world psychiatric community.

The author of this concept was the co-chairman of the stationary forensic psychiatric examination Andrey Snezhnevsky. Luntz openly and mercilessly provoked Leroux, and she quite rightly called him "an inquisitor, a sadist and a collaborator collaborating with the Gestapo." He examined not only my daughter - among his "patients" were well-known dissidents Pyotr Grigorenko, Andrey Sinyavsky, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, Viktor Fainberg, Ivan Yakhimovich, Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Shikhanovich. And of course, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, with whom Lera became friends and together, in the same ward was on compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital in Kazan. The so-called "treatment" of Kazan was cruel and inhuman and, of course, seriously undermined my daughter's health.

“I ASKED TO STOP APPLYING ELECTRIC SHOCK AND SCALE INJECTIONS TO THE DAUGHTER - BECAUSE SHE IS HEALTHY, JUST NOT PLEASANT TO THE AUTHORITIES”

- Did you visit your daughter in Kazan? What did you see there?

- On dates, Nina Fedorovna and I went to Kazan in turn. Leroux was constantly reproached for being friends with more experienced dissidents. In particular, in friendship with Gorbanevskaya - I often saw Natalia when I came to this "special hospital". The visits took place in a large room with a wide and long table, on both sides of which the convicts sat opposite visiting relatives. At the same time, about 20 convicts were brought into the room. An overseer stood near the table - once a month food transfers were allowed. Neither pass the note, nor take the hand, although there was no glass partition, as in a prison cell ...

Lera was a very strong, hardy person, she rarely allowed herself to complain even to her closest ones. But in Kazan, such cruel methods of “treatment” were applied to her that I could not help but go to the head physician - I don’t remember the name of this medical service officer, many years have passed. He asked to stop using electric shocks and savage injections on his daughter - after all, Lera is healthy, she is simply not pleasing to the authorities. A very young girl ... And if you really try, in any of us you can find a clue for a psychiatric diagnosis.

He bluntly told me: “Yes, you are right - in every person, if you look closely, you can find any psychiatric abnormalities. It just needs to be looked at."

The moral of his statement is simple: you can't stand out from the crowd. That was the purpose of punitive psychiatry. Recently I talked with the famous poet, dissident and hereditary psychiatrist Boris Khersonsky. He told me about the tragic fate of the Ukrainian dissident Anna Mikhailenko, the author of the book The KGB Diagnosis is Schizophrenia. And he confirmed that the diagnosis invented by Snezhnevsky is no longer included in the official classifications of mental illness (DSM-5). ICD - 10.

- I fully agree with this point of view. Natalya Gorbanevskaya also wrote about the same in her article “The Shameful Legacy” - this is her review of the book “Institute of Fools” by Viktor Nekipelov, which attracted serious attention.

“If we talk about the “system” and about today, it should be noted: although in the early 90s, in the wake of the revelations of punitive psychiatry that finally reached the Soviet and Russian press, the situation changed for the better in many respects, however, the Serbsky Institute , in the past the stronghold of this system of psychiatric persecution, has again turned decisively towards the past ... and further: refusal to face the past, to pay off with it, is a dangerous thing. And for the mental health of an individual - as a patient or potential patient, and for the psychiatrist himself, and for the mental health of society.

At the beginning of April this year, 2015, a friend called me - New York poetess Irina Aks:

- Rachel! Do you know that Valeria Novodvorskaya's father lives in America? He never gave an interview to anyone about his daughter. After her death, he withdrew into himself ... A very interesting person, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, an active participant in our poetry evenings. And he is ready to meet with you, he wants to talk about Valeria Ilyinichna.

It was difficult to refuse such an unexpected, but tempting offer. Luckily, my friends in the club of the author's song "Blue Trolleybus" kindly undertook to give me a lift to visit Ilya Borisovich Burshtyn and his wife Lidia Nikolaevna, who live in the neighboring state of New Jersey. Burshtyn is the real name of the father of Valeria Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya.

He greeted me cordially, showed me the books donated by his daughter, and led me into a cozy bright kitchen-dining room. And we talked very sincerely for two hours, which, thanks to an interesting interlocutor, flew by for me completely unnoticed.

- Ilya Borisovich, how did you meet Valeria's mother?

Nina Fedorovna's father - a hereditary nobleman, a very nice person Fedor Novodvorsky - lived in Moscow. Nina came to him from Belarus, where she lived with her mother, and entered the First Medical Institute, where my friend studied. After demobilization in 1947, I entered the radiophysics department of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. So we met Nina Fedorovna and got married in Moscow. And Nina went to give birth to her mother in Baranovichi, on demolition - she was almost removed from the train, but she drove home and a few hours later gave birth to a daughter.

It was May 17, 1950. My wife and I were expecting a son, but a girl was born - okay, healthy - and that's good. Soon I passed the summer exams and also came to Belarus to my family, for the first time I took my daughter in my arms. At the end of August, my wife and I left Leroux with her grandmother and left for Moscow. I continued to study, and Nina went to work. She was a pediatrician, later worked in the Moscow Department of Health.

We visited our daughter twice a year. Lera's grandmother loved her very much and devoted a lot of energy to her upbringing. Her name was Marya Vladimirovna, she was strict, but she was disposed towards me, she trusted me to walk with Lera, to ride her daughter on a sled in winter. After Nina Fedorovna and I divorced in 1967, Marya Vladimirovna moved to Moscow and lived with her daughter and granddaughter. I visited them, we talked for a long time. She lived a long, decent life and died when I was already living in America.

- Why did Valeria Ilyinichna bear her mother's surname?

The times are… Jewish surnames were unpopular. The case of poisoning doctors was already gaining momentum, which in the materials of the investigation bore a frank name: "The case of the Zionist conspiracy in the MGB." The flywheel of the "Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Affairs" was spinning, especially after the assassination of Mikhoels on Stalin's orders in 1948. The relations of the USSR with the newly formed state of Israel were very cool - the reaction of Soviet Jews to the visit of Golda Meer to Moscow was too enthusiastic. Stalin built his tricky plans for the resettlement of all the Jews of the USSR to the Far East.

- Is Burshtyn a Jewish surname? More like Polish...

That's right. My parents - Sonya and Boruch - were from Poland, they came to Moscow from Warsaw in 1918. Then they wanted to return, but the Poles organized their own independent state and the parents remained in Soviet Russia. My older sister and brother were born in Warsaw, and this "questionnaire" fact greatly interfered with them later, although at the time of their birth Poland was part of the Russian Empire. I did not know my grandparents - they died in the Warsaw ghetto. I only remember how I went to the post office with my father before the war, sent them parcels - already in the ghetto ...

- How much is this your burshtyn?

It turned out that in translation from Polish "burshtyn" means "amber".

- "Gift of the Sun"?

I prefer the name "tears of the sea" ...

- Ilya Borisovich, how did you get to the front?

- Where did you end the war?

He fought on the Third Belorussian Front, ended the war in Koninsberg (Ilya Borisovich modestly keeps silent about participating in the storming of the city and awarding him a military order).

- Were injured?

No. There were no injuries, he was not taken prisoner. The Lord kept me. I do not know - Jewish or Russian, but He kept me.

- Ilya Borisovich, we all have one God, he has no nationality - I smile.

Do you really think so, Rachel? - my interlocutor is surprised

Of course, Ilya Borisovich. I understand why you are asking me about this, but for now let's get back to the military topic. Did you immediately demobilize after the war?

If only… Almost two years after the end of hostilities he served in Rzhev. I was an ordinary signalman, but already at the headquarters of the division, demobilized in the fall of 1947. Education allowed me to enter the newly organized Institute of International Relations. I saw an announcement about recruitment at MGIMO and went to the chief of staff with a request to send me to study. He answered sharply: "You are not subject to enrollment in this institute." I didn’t hear about national quotas for applicants to institutes then, and I didn’t understand - why, what’s the matter? I realized later - while processing orders at the headquarters, I came across a "neat" phrase: "send to special forces only persons whose nationality corresponds to the republics of the USSR." Alas, Birobidzhan was only the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Therefore, after demobilization, I immediately entered the MPEI - Jews were accepted there. After graduation, he worked as an engineer.

(Author's note. Here Ilya Borisovich again, out of modesty, supports the official version set out on Wikipedia. In fact, he headed the electronics department at a large Moscow research institute that worked for the defense industry - he participated in the development of Russian air defense systems. And on Ilya Borisovich only frowned at my request to be photographed in a jacket with medal slats: - "Why? Just to show off? Is the price of Soviet orders and medals high now? Especially since the State Duma of Russia plans to deprive those participants of the Great Patriotic War who emigrated from Russia. I don’t know if this is true or idle speculation ...)

Adolescence of Valeria. Romantic rebel.

In Moscow, we lived in the VDNKh district, - Ilya Borisovich continues his fascinating story. - Our family was intelligent, but Lera went to the usual, proletarian school. I didn’t like it, several times I offered my wife to transfer Lera to a good school in the center of Moscow, but Nina Fedorovna was against elitist education. Recently I read the memoirs of Vertinsky's daughter about how her parents sent her and her sister to a pioneer camp for the summer. An interesting thing: the well-bred girls returned home with lice, they learned to use foul language," my interlocutor, wise by worldly experience, chuckles without malice.

Lera was an excellent student. Not the only one in the class: we must pay tribute, there were also excellent students among the proletarians. The daughter grew up independent and independent, adult beyond her years. We have developed a good relationship with her, friendly and trusting. Of course, she could not help but notice the critical remarks about the authorities and the party system that Nina Fedorovna and I allowed ourselves to express at home. He gave his daughter to read Solzhenitsyn's story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". Lera was not yet thirteen, but, surprisingly, she perceived everything correctly. From childhood she was a romantic nature, a rebel, even at school she organized some kind of strike. At one time I admired Cuba and Vietnam. She went to the district committee of the Komsomol, asked to be sent to the war in Vietnam as a fighter. She was refused, sent home with an order to come when she learned to shoot. Imagine, for a whole year she got up on Sundays before dawn and went to the shooting ranges. I never learned, with her myopia ...

Fearless, but not reckless.

Lera was seventeen years old when I told her about my decision to divorce Nina Fedorovna. The daughter's reaction was lightning fast: "I'm leaving with you!". I had to persuade her for a long time to stay with her mother, for whom the simultaneous loss of two close people would be a strong blow. I insisted: "Lera, we must stay." My daughter understood. Relatives of Nina Fedorovna also did not condemn me, we continued to maintain respectful relations with them.

How did a young girl from an intelligent family plunge so decisively into the struggle against Soviet power? What was it: recklessness or desperate courage?

Of course, it was desperate courage. She was not reckless, but she did not have a sober calculation, she was a person who was carried away. Deciding on her first serious action, Lera understood that she was risking a lot. By that time, she graduated from secondary school with a silver medal and entered the French department of the prestigious Institute of Foreign Languages. Maurice Thorez.

(Author's note. Ilya Milstein (a well-known Russian journalist - ED.) very accurately noticed this quality of Lera: "Nobility multiplied by fearlessness is a rarity. This physical impossibility to remain silent, which makes a 19-year-old girl scatter leaflets in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, breaking his career and life, dooming him to a torture regime in psychiatric hospitals... And after his release, to distribute Samizdat, organize an underground party, an underground trade union ... and finally come out with a poster for a demonstration, as soon as perestroika and glasnost are breathed in. "You can go to the square, you dare go to the square ... "- these lines of Alexander Galich decorated Democratic Union membership card- an unprecedented party in which she was from the first to the last day. In proud loneliness").

- Valeria Ilyinichna shared her plans with you?

Unfortunately no. I would try to stop her. But by that time I was already living in a new family, in 1967 a son was born to Lidia Nikolaevna and I began to pay less attention to my daughter. The only thing I remember from the events of the autumn of 1969: before going to the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on December 5, she read me her own poem - very angry, directed against the government, reproachfully against the introduction of tanks into Czechoslovakia.

Thank you party

For all that you have done and are doing,

For our current hate

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For all that is betrayed and sold

For the disgraced Motherland

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For a slave afternoon of double-mindedness,

For lies, betrayal and suffocation

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For all denunciations and informers,

Behind the torches on Prague Square

Thank you party!

For a paradise of factories and apartments,

Built on crimes

In the dungeons of old and today

Broken and black world...

Thank you party

Nights full of despair

For our vile silence

Thank you party!

Thank you party

For our bitter unbelief

In the wreckage of the lost truth

In the coming predawn darkness...

Thank you party

For the weight of the acquired truth

And for future fights shots

Thank you party!

I liked the poem, I praised it. But he really didn’t know, he couldn’t even imagine that Leroy’s sarcastically called “Thank you, party, to you!” will become the text of a leaflet, numerous copies of which my daughter and several of her friends will boldly drop on the heads of visitors to the premises in which the most important social and political events of the state were held.

First arrest

Leroux and her friends were instantly arrested in the hall of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, and accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR), - the voice of 92-year-old Ilya Nikolaevich sadly, but accurately mints the name and number of the article of the criminal code. “The daughter was placed in solitary confinement in the detention center in Lefortovo,” he continues. - Daniil Romanovich Lunts, a KGB colonel, who headed the diagnostic department at the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry named after V.P. Serbsky, began to visit her often. Daniil Lunts, together with the director of the institute, Georgy Vasilyevich Morozov, were the most famous representatives of the criminal practice of using psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR, followers of the concept of "sluggish (asymptomatic) schizophrenia" rejected by the world psychiatric community.

The author of this concept was the co-chairman of the stationary forensic psychiatric examination A.V. Snezhnevsky. Luntz openly and mercilessly provoked Leroux, and she absolutely deservedly called him "an inquisitor, a sadist and a collaborator collaborating with the GESTAPO." He examined not only my daughter - among his "patients" were well-known dissidents Pyotr Grigorenko, Sinyavsky, Yesenin-Volpin,. Fainberg, Yakhimovich, Bukovsky, Shikhanovich. And of course, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, with whom Lera became friends and together, in the same ward was under compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital in Kazan. The so-called "treatment" in Kazan was cruel and inhuman, and, of course, seriously undermined my daughter's health.

- Ilya Borisovich, did you personally visit your daughter in Kazan? If yes, what did you see there?

On "dates" Nina Fedorovna and I went to Kazan in turn. Leroux was constantly reproached for being friends with more experienced dissidents. In particular - in friendship with Gorbanevskaya; I often saw Natalya when I came to this "special hospital". The visits took place in a large room, with a wide and long table, on both sides of which the convicts sat opposite visiting relatives. At the same time, about 20 convicts were brought into the room. An overseer stood near the table - once a month food transfers were allowed. It was impossible to hand over the note or take the hand, although there was no glass partition, as in a prison cell.

Lera was a very strong, hardy person, she rarely allowed herself to complain even to the closest people. But in Kazan, such cruel methods of “treatment” were applied to her that I could not help but go to the head physician - I don’t remember the name of this medical service officer, many years have passed. He asked to stop using electric shocks and savage injections on his daughter - after all, Lera is healthy, she is simply not pleasing to the authorities. A very young girl ... And if you really try, in any of us you can find a clue for a psychiatric diagnosis.

He bluntly told me: "Yes, you are right - in every person, if you look closely, you can find any psychiatric abnormalities. You just need to not look closely."

The moral of his statement is simple: you can not stand out from the crowd. That was the purpose of punitive psychiatry. Recently I talked with the famous poet, dissident and hereditary psychiatrist Boris Khersonsky. He told me about the tragic fate of the Ukrainian dissident Ganna Mikhailenko, the author of the book "KGB Diagnosis - Schizophrenia." And he confirmed that the diagnosis invented by Snezhnevsky is no longer included in the official classifications of mental illness (DSM-5). ICD - 10.

I fully agree with this point of view. Natalia Gorbanevskaya wrote about the same in her article "The Shameful Legacy" - this is her review of Viktor Nekipelov's book "Institute of Fools" that attracted serious attention:

“If we talk about the “system” and about the present day, then it should be noted: although in the early 90s, in the wake of the revelations of punitive psychiatry that finally reached the Soviet and Russian press, the situation changed for the better in many respects, however, the Serbsky Institute, in the past the stronghold of this system of psychiatric persecution, again decisively turned to the past ... and further: refusal to look the past in the eye, to settle with it is a dangerous thing. And for the mental health of an individual - as a patient or potential patient, and for the psychiatrist himself, and for the mental health of society "

Exclusive interview with "Krugozor"

Ilya Borisovich Burshtyn,

speaking to the press for the first time

about his legendary Lera.

Tempting offer

At the beginning of April this year, 2015, a friend called me - New York poetess Irina Aks:

... They were expecting a son, and a daughter was born

- Ilya Borisovich, how did you meet Valeria's mother?

- The father of Nina Fedorovna - a hereditary nobleman, a very nice person Fedor Novodvorsky - lived in Moscow. Nina came to him from Belarus, where she lived with her mother, and entered the First Medical Institute, where my friend studied. After demobilization in 1947, I entered the radiophysics department of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. So we met Nina Fedorovna and got married in Moscow. And Nina went to give birth to her mother in Baranovichi, on demolition - she was almost removed from the train, but she drove home and a few hours later gave birth to a daughter.

- Why did Valeria Ilyinichna bear her mother's surname?

- The time is such ... Jewish surnames were unpopular. The case of poisoning doctors was already gaining momentum, which in the materials of the investigation bore a frank name: "The case of the Zionist conspiracy in the MGB." The flywheel of the "Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Affairs" was spinning, especially after the assassination of Mikhoels on Stalin's orders in 1948. The relations of the USSR with the newly formed state of Israel were very cool - the reaction of Soviet Jews to the visit of Golda Meer to Moscow was too enthusiastic. Stalin built his tricky plans for the resettlement of all the Jews of the USSR to the Far East.

- Is Burshtyn a Jewish surname? More like Polish...

- That's right. My parents - Sonya and Boruch - were from Poland, they came to Moscow from Warsaw in 1918. Then they wanted to return, but the Poles organized their own independent state and the parents remained in Soviet Russia. My older sister and brother were born in Warsaw, and this "questionnaire" fact greatly interfered with them later, although at the time of their birth Poland was part of the Russian Empire. I did not know my grandparents - they died in the Warsaw ghetto. I only remember how I went to the post office with my father before the war, sent them parcels - already in the ghetto ...

- How much is this your burshtyn?

It turned out that in translation from Polish "burshtyn" means "amber".

- "Gift of the Sun"?

I prefer the name "tears of the sea" ...

War

- Ilya Borisovich, how did you get to the front?

- In July 1941, he volunteered for the army. He was a signalman, and therefore survived. Now I’m reading about the misadventures of the infantry during that war, and I’m even somehow ashamed to stick out my military merits. The infantrymen, of course, were a hundred times harder.

- Where did you end the war?

- He fought on the Third Belorussian Front, ended the war in Koninsberg (Ilya Borisovich modestly keeps silent about participation in the storming of the city and awarding the military order).

- Were injured?

- Not. There were no injuries, he was not taken prisoner. The Lord kept me. I do not know - Jewish or Russian, but He kept me.

- Ilya Borisovich, we all have one God, he has no nationality - I smile.

"Do you really think so, Rachel?" - my interlocutor is surprised

Of course, Ilya Borisovich. I understand why you are asking me about this, but for now let's get back to the military topic. Did you immediately demobilize after the war?

- If only ... Almost two years after the end of hostilities, he served in Rzhev. I was an ordinary signalman, but already at the headquarters of the division, demobilized in the fall of 1947. Education allowed me to enter the newly organized Institute of International Relations. I saw an announcement about recruitment at MGIMO and went to the chief of staff with a request to send me to study. He answered sharply: "You are not subject to enrollment in this institute." I didn’t hear about national quotas for applicants to institutes then, and I didn’t understand - why, what’s the matter? I realized later - while processing orders at the headquarters, I came across a "neat" phrase: "send to special forces only persons whose nationality corresponds to the republics of the USSR." Alas, Birobidzhan was only the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Therefore, after demobilization, I immediately entered the MPEI - Jews were accepted there. After graduation, he worked as an engineer.

Adolescence of Valeria. Romantic rebel.

- In Moscow, we lived in the VDNKh district, - Ilya Borisovich continues his fascinating story. - Our family was intelligent, but Lera went to the usual, proletarian school. I didn’t like it, several times I offered my wife to transfer Lera to a good school in the center of Moscow, but Nina Fedorovna was against elitist education. Recently I read the memoirs of Vertinsky's daughter about how her parents sent her and her sister to a pioneer camp for the summer. An interesting thing: the well-bred girls returned home with lice, they learned to use foul language," my interlocutor, wise by worldly experience, chuckles without malice.

Fearless, but not reckless.

- Lera was seventeen years old when I told her about my decision to divorce Nina Fedorovna. The daughter's reaction was lightning fast: "I'm leaving with you!". I had to persuade her for a long time to stay with her mother, for whom the simultaneous loss of two close people would be a strong blow. I insisted: "Lera, we must stay." My daughter understood. Relatives of Nina Fedorovna also did not condemn me, we continued to maintain respectful relations with them.

- How did a young girl from an intelligent family plunge so resolutely into the struggle against Soviet power? What was it: recklessness or desperate courage?

- Of course, it was desperate courage. She was not reckless, but she did not have a sober calculation, she was a person who was carried away. Deciding on her first serious action, Lera understood that she was risking a lot. By that time, she graduated from secondary school with a silver medal and entered the French department of the prestigious Institute of Foreign Languages. Maurice Thorez.

(Author's note. Ilya Milstein (a well-known Russian journalist - ED.) very accurately noticed this quality of Lera: "Nobility multiplied by fearlessness is a rarity. This physical impossibility to remain silent, which makes a 19-year-old girl scatter leaflets in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, breaking his career and life, dooming him to a torture regime in psychiatric hospitals... And after his release, to distribute Samizdat, organize an underground party, an underground trade union ... and finally come out with a poster for a demonstration, as soon as perestroika and glasnost are breathed in. "You can go to the square, you dare go to the square ... "- these lines of Alexander Galich decoratedDemocratic Union membership card - an unprecedented party in which she was from the first to the last day. In proud loneliness").

- Valeria Ilyinichna shared her plans with you?

- Unfortunately no. I would try to stop her. But by that time I was already living in a new family, in 1967 a son was born to Lidia Nikolaevna and I began to pay less attention to my daughter. The only thing I remember from the events of the autumn of 1969: before going to the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on December 5, she read me her own poem - very angry, directed against the government, reproachfully against the introduction of tanks into Czechoslovakia.

Thank you party
For all that you have done and are doing,
For our current hate
Thank you party!

Thank you party
For all that is betrayed and sold
For the disgraced Motherland
Thank you party!

Thank you party
For a slave afternoon of double-mindedness,
For lies, betrayal and suffocation
Thank you party!

Thank you party
For all denunciations and informers,
Behind the torches on Prague Square
Thank you party!

For a paradise of factories and apartments,
Built on crimes
In the dungeons of old and today
Broken and black world...

Thank you party
Nights full of despair
For our vile silence
Thank you party!

Thank you party
For our bitter unbelief
In the wreckage of the lost truth
In the coming predawn darkness...

Thank you party
For the weight of the acquired truth
And for future fights shots
Thank you party!

First arrest

- Leroux and her friends were instantly arrested in the hall of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, and accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR), - the voice of 92-year-old Ilya Nikolaevich sadly, but accurately minted the name and number of the article of the Criminal Code. “The daughter was placed in solitary confinement in the detention center in Lefortovo,” he continues. - Daniil Romanovich Lunts, a KGB colonel, who headed the diagnostic department at the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry named after V.P. Serbsky, began to visit her often. Daniil Lunts, together with the director of the institute, Georgy Vasilyevich Morozov, were the most famous representatives of the criminal practice of using psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR, followers of the concept of "sluggish (asymptomatic) schizophrenia" rejected by the world psychiatric community.

- Ilya Borisovich, did you personally visit your daughter in Kazan? If yes, what did you see there?

- On "dates" Nina Fedorovna and I went to Kazan in turn. Leroux was constantly reproached for being friends with more experienced dissidents. In particular - in friendship with Gorbanevskaya; I often saw Natalya when I came to this "special hospital". The visits took place in a large room, with a wide and long table, on both sides of which the convicts sat opposite visiting relatives. At the same time, about 20 convicts were brought into the room. An overseer stood near the table - once a month food transfers were allowed. It was impossible to hand over the note or take the hand, although there was no glass partition, as in a prison cell.

He bluntly told me: "Yes, you are right - in every person, if you look closely, you can find any psychiatric abnormalities. You just need to not look closely."

- ...the moral of his statement is simple: you can't stand out from the crowd. That was the purpose of punitive psychiatry. Recently I talked with the famous poet, dissident and hereditary psychiatrist Boris Khersonsky. He told me about the tragic fate of the Ukrainian dissident Ganna Mikhailenko, the author of the book "KGB Diagnosis - Schizophrenia." And he confirmed that the diagnosis invented by Snezhnevsky is no longer included in the official classifications of mental illness (DSM-5). ICD - 10.

- I fully agree with this point of view. Natalia Gorbanevskaya wrote about the same in her article "The Shameful Legacy" - this is her review of Viktor Nekipelov's book "Institute of Fools" that attracted serious attention:
“If we talk about the “system” and about the present day, then it should be noted: although in the early 90s, in the wake of the revelations of punitive psychiatry that finally reached the Soviet and Russian press, the situation changed for the better in many respects, however, the Serbsky Institute, in the past the stronghold of this system of psychiatric persecution, again decisively turned to the past ... and further: refusal to look the past in the eye, to settle with it is a dangerous thing. And for the mental health of an individual - as a patient or potential patient, and for the psychiatrist himself, and for the mental health of society "
(Source: Almanac "Captivity". Supplement to the magazine "Index/Dossier on censorship ").

- The scale of the cruelty of the system of punishment of dissidents in the USSR was monstrous. Those who fell into the millstones of the punitive system, whom the criminal Soviet authorities could not take their lives, were cynically maimed, depriving young and healthy people of the opportunity to build a full-fledged family ...

- You are right, Rachel. Much has been written about this - both men and women were maimed. During the "treatment" in Kazan, Lera, a young, healthy girl, was forever deprived of the main privilege of a woman: the opportunity to become a mother. Her health was seriously damaged. But the strength of spirit and determination of Lera, the numerous tests that followed the first arrest, the moral bullying of opponents - "near-minded" politicians and "yellow", contract journalists - did not break. Only when the dictatorial regime of President Putin came to power, Lera noted with bitterness that people can be taught to desire freedom, but it is impossible to force them to be free.

(Author's note. This recognition was very difficult for Ilya Borisovich. Until the last moment, I did not want to publicize this very personal fact of Valeria Ilyinichna's biography. But the cynicism of the Soviet political system and the crowd brought up by that system, who more than once offended the human dignity of the Woman whom I respect and appreciate immensely, they force me to take a step that is difficult from the standpoint of journalistic ethics.It was the System that turned a young, healthy and very beautiful girl into a disabled person, who was shamelessly ridiculed by everyone who was not lazy).

- Valeria Ilyinichna, even after returning from Kazan, often ended up in a temporary detention facility and for "short-term" compulsory treatment in a Moscow psychiatric clinic, popularly known as "Kashirka". What happened to her there, do you know?

- She did not complain about the detention center - she said that the criminals respect her and do not offend her. Frequent searches of the apartment - this, of course, was a great inconvenience for the family, which after my departure consisted of only three women ... Psychiatric clinics - it was a real punishment. In "Kashirka" she was kept for a month, but the head of the department where she was placed was a decent person - she was not stabbed with psychotropic drugs. However, the hospital environment itself, life among mentally ill people, was terrible. Once Lera complained that one of the patients tried to scratch her eyes out by tearing off her glasses. It was scary….

One day, my daughter ended up in another department - to a woman doctor who prescribed very potent injections for her. I saw Lera absolutely helpless: she was severely stabbed. Lera rarely complained, but then she could not restrain herself: she asked me to help. I told the doctor that she was acting incompetent, and that she was mine. daughter is healthy.

The answer was sharp:

- There are no healthy people here. Only a mentally ill person can oppose the Soviet state!

- There is a lot of information about the life of Valeria Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya on the Internet. Both good and bad written abound. What kind of person was your daughter, Ilya Borisovich, really?

I respect everything my daughter has done. And therefore not Lera, I insist, - Valeria Ilyinichna! - was a very honest, decent and courageous person. She was a Person. Outstanding personality. Naive? Yes, she didn’t understand people very well and therefore she received a lot of disappointments in life: at first she was fascinated by a person, inspired, and then she suffered ... She was a maximalist: she demanded a lot from herself and from her associates, before whom she sometimes set too difficult, impossible tasks .

She was sincere, intelligent, benevolent and enthusiastic: I really liked going to the theater with her, because she knew how to explain to me simply and interestingly any, the most complex and intricate director's interpretation. She was interested in literature, philosophy, history, dramaturgy. She studied a lot herself, achieved everything with her own mind and perseverance.

And of course, the main thing for her was her service to Russia. She believed that every person should lay down his life for the Russian people. And when I told her: "Lera, what kind of Russian people? What are you worried about? The Russian people do not need freedom, they only need cheap vodka and cheap sausage! Not everyone, of course - but almost everyone, 95 percent of the population of Russia," she told me calmly and imperturbably answered: "And I work for the sake of those remaining five percent who need Freedom!"

- Have you ever had a serious disagreement with your daughter?

- We could argue, of course, but quickly put up. I know that evil tongues say that my trusting relationship with my daughter was used by the KGB. This organization often forced close relatives of politically convicted people to follow and report... Such facts, alas, are known. But I am clean before the bright memory of my daughter - I have never been engaged in denunciation. The only major quarrel between us occurred in connection with my departure for America. She suffered this event very hard. She was offended greatly, called a traitor - she was a maximalist after all. At first, I considered this a colossal betrayal. But her heart was kind, she was a quick-witted person, she knew how to forgive. This quarrel did not become a complete break for us.

- Valeria Ilyinichna flew to America. Did you see your daughter or was she very busy?

- We saw each other, but not often - only three times in twenty years. The first time she came to us together with Borovoy. The second time she came herself, she spoke to the residents of our town, and then we sat at home. We had a good time, in a family way ... We called back: I always called on her birthday, this is a must. But he called, of course, not only once a year. It was just more convenient for us to correspond, Lera did not really like talking on the phone. We discussed with her the list of poets she wanted to include in her collection "Poets and Tsars", we even argued a little, but not much. My most favorite of her books is a collection-cycle of her lectures "My Carthage must be destroyed." I have all or almost all of her books - Konstantin Borovoy helped her to publish them, after all, she was his assistant when he was a deputy of the State Duma. They are interesting - if you have not read, be sure to read.

Irreparable loss

- July 12 last year ... Lera's death was a complete surprise for me. Just before that, I talked to her on the phone, everything was fine. Of course, this was not malicious poisoning (such rumors circulated), her death was natural. She had diabetes, and a small festering wound on her leg, which caused sepsis, became fatal. The people who lived with Nina Fedorovna and helped her with the housework told me about it.

When Lera left, I very clearly felt the deafening emptiness here (Ilya Borisovich's palm rests on his chest, covering his heart) ... For me, Moscow was empty. I didn’t have time to tell my daughter so much: I didn’t say how much I love her, how proud I am of her. Somehow it was not customary with us ... Now it's too late.

(Author's note. There is not a drop of ostentatious tearful notes in Ilya Borisovich's voice, but it sounds quieter, more muffled. Only his gaze betrays all the deep degree of grief and despair of the father, who loved his daughter immensely, and who knew grief to outlive his child).

- Our whole conversation with you, dear Ilya Borisovich, was about this, her paternal love and the bitterness of an irreparable loss became its leitmotif. And the loss, alas, is not the only one ...

- Borya ... - unanimously, in one voice pronounce the name of Boris Nikolaevich Nemtsov Ilya Borisovich and his wife Lidia Nikolaevna. - What kind of person has lost Russia, this is a great grief! But just recently he wrote about Valeria Ilyinichna, perhaps he wrote best of all

Boris Nemtsov: "Lera is one of the few encyclopedically educated people in Russia, distinguished by an iron will, conviction and integrity. Compromises are not about her. She was persecuted, thrown into prison, recognized as mentally ill ... but no one ever managed to bend her and break. She was a pure and bright person. She was surprised when faced with meanness, betrayal. Despite her hard life, she managed to maintain some kind of childish naivety and gullibility.

______________________________
On the picture:

dedicatory autograph of Valeria Novodvorskaya to her father on her book;

IB Burshtyn - veteran of the Great Patriotic War;

Valeria Novodvorskaya in contact with her half-brother. 1973;

at Ilya Borisovich's house - all the books of his daughter, Valeria Novodvorskaya.

/ Photo from the personal archive of I.B. Burshtyn /

http://www.krugozormagazine.com/show/article.2590.html

Valeria Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya (May 17, 1950, Baranovichi, Byelorussian SSR, USSR - July 12, 2014, Moscow, Russia) - Soviet dissident and human rights activist; Russian liberal politician and publicist, founder of the right-wing liberal parties Democratic Union (Chairman of the Central Coordinating Council) and Western Choice.

Author of the books “The Catcher in Lies”, “My Carthage Must Be Destroyed” (a course of lectures given several times at the Russian State Humanitarian University during the rectorship of Yuri Afanasiev), “Beyond Despair”, “Farewell of the Slav”, “Poets and Tsars”. Member (along with K. N. Borov and G. P. Yakunin) of the editorial board of The New Times. Published in Grani.ru, Ekho Moskvy, The New Times. Since 2011, together with Borovoy, she has been releasing videos commenting on the current political situation.

Polyglot, fluent in English, Ancient Greek, Italian, Latin, German and French.

Novodvorskaya Valeria Ilyinichna is a whole era in the development of dissident thought in Russia. As a political activist, successful journalist, publicist, polyglot, dissident and even blogger, Novodvorskaya's activities were full-scale and visible at all levels of life in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. She is an example of faith in the truth of her cause and following her principles and views despite persecution and other most difficult circumstances.

The actions of this persistent woman and ambiguous harsh statements in public can be evaluated in completely different ways, but Novodvorskaya's long productive activity made her famous all over the world and gave wide coverage to her thoughts and judgments.

Valeria Novodvorskaya died on July 12, 2014 in a Moscow hospital. The controversial human rights activist and dissident died from a wound on her leg.

It is difficult to argue that the death of Valeria Novodvorskaya, which was announced on July 12, has significantly changed the alignment of political forces in the Russian Federation. Novodvorskaya died in the Moscow City Hospital No. 13, surrounded by doctors. They could not save her, the inflammation had gone too far, and age and lifestyle did not contribute to the healing of a wound that, under other circumstances, might not have been dangerous. No one began to speculate about the malicious elimination of a dangerous political opponent. There were no grounds for such versions. The cause of death of Valeria Novodvorskaya was announced immediately. It was phlegmon of the foot.

Her great-grandfather was a professional revolutionary, grandfather was born in Tobolsk jail, where his parents, revolutionaries, were serving time.

Mother is a doctor, father is an engineer. Both were members of the CPSU. On November 3, 2009, in an interview, she denied the information that she was refusing her father or bearing his last name. Moreover, she added that it was her father who abandoned her, suggesting that he left the family and went to America on an immigration card, which he could falsify by changing his real name.

Mother - Nina Fedorovna Novodvorskaya (March 29, 1928 - July 20, 2017) - a pediatrician, headed polyclinics, then - in a leadership position in the Moscow Department of Health. Father - Ilya Borisovich Burshtyn (February 23, 1923 - March 1, 2016) - engineer, graduated from the radiophysics department of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, served as a signalman during the war, fought on the 3rd Belorussian Front, reached Königsberg. After the end of the war, he headed the electronics department at the Moscow Research Institute and participated in the creation of air defense systems. The father is a Jew, the mother's surname, as there was an anti-Semitic campaign, and the parents were afraid for their daughter. Mother from a noble family. Valeria Ilyinichna herself considered herself Russian, and for some reason estimated the share of Jewish blood at 1/8. At the age of 9 she moved to Moscow.

In 1977 she graduated from the evening faculty of foreign languages of the Moscow Regional Pedagogical Institute. Krupskaya.

On December 5, 1969, in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, Valeria distributed leaflets with a poem of her own composition “Thank you, party, to you!”, She was immediately arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (the leaflet was directed against the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia). She was placed in solitary confinement in the Lefortovo KGB prison.

She was placed in solitary confinement in the Lefortovo prison. When she was visited there by the head of the diagnostic department of the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Serbsky, KGB Colonel Daniil Lunts, she told him that he was "an inquisitor, sadist and collaborator collaborating with the Gestapo."

From June 1970 to February 1972 she was under compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital in Kazan with a diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia, paranoid personality development."

Novodvorskaya's attitude to the "real mentally ill" with whom she communicated while under compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital:

In this department, the “psychos” broke two pairs of glasses and poured boiling tea on me once. By God, I was close to understanding Hitler's measures to exterminate the lunatics. I myself would not do this, but ... I was not sorry.

In 1972, she participated in the reproduction and distribution of samizdat.

In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost came, and Valeria Novodvorskaya threw herself into politics with renewed vigor. Its radical message, which went beyond reform, was to call for the dismantling of the Soviet system and the rejection of state socialism. She was arrested again. In total, between 1987 and 1991, this happened 17 times. The last time she was detained for publishing the article "Heil, Gorbachev!" in the newsletter of her new Democratic Union party. The hated regime fell, but Novodvorskaya's happiness was short-lived. The rule of Boris Yeltsin, during which she made her only unsuccessful attempt to compete for power, caused her increasing frustration, especially after the start of the war with Chechnya. Valeria Novodvorskaya never became a deputy. Then ex-KGB officer Putin came to power, brought back the Soviet anthem, crushed Chechnya, and unleashed an open fight against civil liberties in Russia.

In 1973-1975. She worked as a teacher in a children's sanatorium.

In 1988, she became one of the participants in the creation of the Democratic Union (DS) party. Since 1988, she regularly appeared in the illegal newspaper of the Moscow organization of the DC "Free Word", in 1990 the newspaper's publishing house of the same name published a collection of her articles.
In September 1990, after the publication of an article in the party newspaper Svobodnoe Slovo under the heading "Heil, Gorbachev!" and speeches at rallies, where she tore up portraits of Mikhail Gorbachev, was accused of publicly insulting the honor and dignity of the President of the USSR and insulting the state flag.
She was baptized in 1990. Belongs to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, sharply criticizing the Russian Orthodox Church.
Fluent in English and French. Reads in German, Italian, understands the Belarusian language.

In September 1993, after the decree of President Boris Yeltsin on the dissolution of the RF Armed Forces, she was the first to support this decree. Organized rallies in support of the president.

In October 1993, she participated in the founding congress of the Russia's Choice bloc. She was going to run in Ivanovo, but did not have time to collect the required number of signatures.

On March 19, 1994, the Krasnopresnenskaya prosecutor's office began checking the activities of Valeria Novodvorskaya under articles 71 and 74 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (propaganda of civil war and inciting ethnic hatred).

On January 27, 1995, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation initiated a criminal case (N229120) because of Novodvorskaya's articles published in the Novy Vzglyad newspaper in 1993-1994. On August 8, 1995, the prosecutor's office of the Central District of Moscow dismissed the case due to the absence of corpus delicti in its actions.
On August 14, 1995, the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office opened another criminal case against Novodvorskaya. The reason was a leaflet written by Novodvorskaya for the JEM picket on April 8. The case was transferred to the Ostankino prosecutor's office, which did not find any corpus delicti in the leaflet.
In December 1995, in the elections to the State Duma of the 5th convocation, Novodvorskaya entered the electoral list of the Party of Economic Freedom. In addition, Novodvorskaya registered in the single-mandate constituency N192 in Moscow. Lost the elections.

"Zyuganov has a small penis. Down!" - Valeria Novodvorskaya.

In March 2010, Novodvorskaya signed the appeal of the opposition, was engaged in journalism and educational activities. In 2013, together with Borov, she began to create the Western Choice party.

"Here it is, the Russian miracle and the mysterious Russian soul! Manic-depressive psychosis! That's why we fight so cool! ... The classic of the genre is the Great Patriotic War. Here is the formula for our mass heroism! The country has finally been let off the chain, and she, not having the courage to cut her throat own Stalin and his executioners, enthusiastically clutched at the throat of Hitler and his monsters, when the Master, Big Brother, Uncle Joe said to her: "Face!" For four years, a maniac, and then Heroes of the Soviet Union and holders of the Order of Glory of three degrees for a sweet soul were sent to the Gulag, often from Buchenwald to Kolyma, without changing cars, only switching points.And you want me to believe that this could be done with normal people?" - Valeria Novodvorskaya.

Any doctor, yes no, even any specialist working with client-patients daily faces manifestations of psychopathy. Yes, I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, but many years of working with patients have allowed me to develop some kind of my own concept of the principles of behavior with psychopaths, the number of which, alas, is not decreasing.

So, unlike mental illness, psychopathy is a disease state, constitutional anomalies, a kind of characterological deformities, which are manifested primarily by behavioral disorders. Since human behavior is primarily due to the state of the emotional-volitional sphere, the deviation in the functioning of precisely that personal component determines the clinical content of psychopathy.

With all the variety of observed characterological anomalies, their common feature is a violation of adaptation to the conditions of social life. Unlike similar behavioral disorders in mental illness, emotional and volitional disharmony to a lesser extent affects the violation of the value directions of the individual .. Although, the line separating far-reaching psychopathy from a mental disorder is very arbitrary ...

In general, all of the above seems to be fairly well known. Let's move on to the medical history. We will no longer be able to examine Novodvorskaya, but you can read her detailed autobiography, she is quite frank in her book of memoirs. Yes, we have before us pages from the medical history of a patient with dissocial personality disorder (unstable psychopathy). From childhood, such patients ignore generally accepted norms of behavior, discipline requirements, and pedagogical prohibitions. Yes. Novodvorskaya's teachers were real teachers, they did not send Valery to a special school, but released him with a medal, quietly turning a blind eye to disputes with the historian and refusing labor lessons.

Valeria argued with her dearest historian, showing emotional stupidity - she drowned her comrades, her parents and her excellent teachers. She continued at the institute, again she came across nice teachers, and students who did not tell anyone about Novodvorskaya's speeches at seminars on philosophy.

The schizoid element of Novodvorskaya's psychopathy is obvious - she lived in her own literary world among the heroes of Dumas and Sabatini and dreamed of accomplishing a feat, and then going to an open trial and execution, by the way, here we, not by night, will be mentioned, we will turn to her beloved revolutionaries - Perovskaya and Figner , clearly expressed psychopaths ...

Novodvorskaya performs her stupid feat - she scatters leaflets written by hand in the theater, and finally they grab her. Of course, no one understands the logical inconsistency, the internal inconsistency of Novodvorskaya's judgments, all the more so in general resembling formal thought disorders in schizophrenia. On the other hand, being incomprehensible to many people around her, she created the impression of a thoughtful enthusiast, passionate about her ideas, taking a leading position in the protest movement.

Novodvorskaya’s treatment methods were, of course, savage, by and large a good psychotherapist should have worked with her at school, possibly on the basis of psychoanalysis methods, in any case, this clinical case did not require the use of antipsychotics, Novodvorskaya’s successful rehabilitation would be quite possible, it was easy to switch it to creative work, such as literary translations.

The wrong diagnosis made to the patient Novodvorskaya - schizophrenia, instead of psychopathy, determined her further fate. Well, the result of her, so to speak, political activity is known to us - the decrepit dictatorship of the followers of the Chuhchi ideas was replaced by the current system, and if this is Novodvorskaya's ideal, then it means that she was still treated incorrectly ...

Reviews

It is difficult to disagree with the author. Novodvorskaya is, of course, a bright patient ...
But the whole trouble is that there are many transitional forms of diseases of psychos with a pathology that is not immediately diagnosed ... And they, relatives, ring where they can and how they can ...

From personal experience I know how many clinical idiots, i.e. individuals diagnosed with diseases. I know one person with Down's syndrome (this diagnosis was clearly stated in his polyclinic "card"). But nothing terrible. Graduated from the institute. I even defended my PhD! (Mom was the chairman of the trade union committee of the institute for a long time) He works at the institute and now, at the department of histology. He was removed from the clinical department, where he dealt with the sick (where the staff went on strike: An obvious idiot was allowed to treat the sick!). Now dealing with student slaves and slides under a microscope...