Valeria Novodvorskaya was named “Don Quixote of Russian Democracy”. Most likely, she was the last true representative of that class. “Publicist, politician, social critic with a sharp-tongued wit, Novodvorskaya.. On December 5, 1969, at the age of 19, she threw anti-Soviet leaflets from the balcony of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses reading “Down with Soviet power!” and protesting the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year.. That action led to her being confined to a Soviet psychiatric hospital..She was convicted of anti-Soviet activities again in 1978, 1985, and 1986. She faced criminal investigations for her political activities again in 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995, and 1996″. (Radio Free Europe) In one of her last articles published less than a month before her untimely death at a Moscow hospital in July 2014, the circumstances of which still raises many questions, Novodvorskaya made a prediction on the war between Ukraine and Russia: “Ukrainian peasants have already on occasion met the Goliaths from the NKVD by withdrawing collectively as entire villages into the woods..Of course, it is no easy thing to shoot at living people, and the peaceful and good Ukrainian Davids are mastering these cruel new rules only with difficulty..but there are no doubts that “the Ukrainian David will necessarily defeat” the Russian “Goliath” because Ukrainians know that they must defend themselves and their country in order to secure “a better future without barbed wire and without [another] Terror Famine… Michelangelo memorialized David and not Goliath. And sculptors, composers, artists and poets will celebrate the achievements of Ukrainian Davids.” Novodvorskaya says she does not anticipate pictures with titles like ‘Putin Steals Crimea from Ukraine’ or sculptures like “GRU Agents from Russia Teach the Separatists to Fight to the Death on the Barricades.’’ (The Interpreter)
