Sofiya Vasilyevna Kalistratova (), also known as Sofia Kallistratova (; – 5 December 1989) was a public defense lawyer in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. She defended various

Soviet dissidents Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term ''dissident'' was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960 ...

and from 1977 was a member of the

Moscow Helsinki Group The Moscow Helsinki Group (also known as the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, ) was one of Russia's leading human rights organisations. It was originally set up in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords and to report to the West ...

(MHG), distributing information about human rights violations in the Soviet Union.

Biography

. Born in the town of Rylsk, 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.''Kristina Gorelik''
У правозащитного движения женское лицо
She joined the

as a legal consultant. The

KGB The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...

searched Kalistratova's apartment several times and confiscated typewriters and documents. Some of Kalistratova's friends were arrested. The activity of the

became nearly impossible when

Yuri Andropov Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov ( – 9 February 1984) was a Soviet politician who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from late 1982 until his death in 1984. He previously served as the List of Chairmen of t ...

started his campaign of repression against dissidents.Letter
from

to the Central Committee (10 July 1970) Supporters claim that all their work defending the human right to obtain, discuss, and distribute information was legal.Conference on Security And Co-Operation in Europe Final Act. Helsinki, 1975.] As many other human rights defenders, she was accused of Anti-Sovietism; the charges were later dropped. In 1987, she tried to initiate a campaign for amnesty for

political prisoner A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although ...

s. During

perestroika ''Perestroika'' ( ; rus, перестройка, r=perestrojka, p=pʲɪrʲɪˈstrojkə, a=ru-perestroika.ogg, links=no) was a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s, widely associ ...

and

glasnost ''Glasnost'' ( ; , ) is a concept relating to openness and transparency. It has several general and specific meanings, including a policy of maximum openness in the activities of state institutions and freedom of information and the inadmissi ...

, 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 (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." Yuly Kim dedicated her a song.

Death

Kalistratova 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.http://bibliotera.org.ua/book.php?id=1153866711&s=81

Works

References

External links

*
''New York Times'' article
29 July 1985
Moscow Helsinki Group website
(in Russian)
Софья Васильевна Каллистратова
(in Russian) {{DEFAULTSORT:Kalistratova, Sofiya 1907 births 1989 deaths People from Kursk Oblast People from Rylsky Uyezd Soviet dissidents Soviet activists Soviet lawyers Soviet women lawyers Moscow Helsinki Group Soviet human rights activists Women human rights activists Public defenders Moscow State University alumni 20th-century women lawyers