Russian Rights Activist Has Heart Attack
Russia’s main human rights campaigner, Sergei A. Kovalev, suffered a serious heart attack Monday and was admitted to a Moscow hospital.
“His condition is grave,” his aide Irina Yeryomina said, adding that the 66-year-old biologist was in intensive care.
Yeryomina said Kovalev, who has been highly critical of the Russian military campaign in rebel Chechnya, was taken ill early Monday. She gave no further details, although he has a history of health problems.
A member of Kovalev’s household said doctors were telling the family his condition was stable but that its course over the next few days was hard to predict.
Kovalev championed human rights as a dissident with Nobel Prize winner Andrei D. Sakharov in the 1970s and served 10 years in labor camps and exile.
When his friend and mentor died in 1989, he assumed the mantle of Russia’s chief rights campaigner, becoming both head of a parliamentary committee on human rights and a commissioner in President Boris N. Yeltsin’s administration.
Despite his health problems, Kovalev shuttled back and forth between Moscow and Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, during 1995, campaigning to stop the war in that separatist republic.
Chechnya made Kovalev a household name in Russia and turned him into a target for abuse by hard-liners in Yeltsin’s camp.
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