Valery Borshchev: biography, activities and interesting facts

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:40

This man has been one of the ideologists of the human rights movement in our country for several decades. Valery Borshchev, namely, he will be discussed, began to raise the problem of human rights violations even at a time when the KGB opened a real hunt for those who were underground trying to help ordinary citizens restore justice. First of all, he defended the interests of political prisoners, as well as people who were persecuted by the authorities for their religious beliefs.

Today Valery Borshchev is an authoritative champion of truth and an active fighter against lawlessness. He took these functions as a basis, working in the Human Rights Committee under the President of the Russian Federation, in the Moscow Helsinki Group, in the All-Russian Human Rights Movement “For Human Rights”.

What was remarkable in the biography of this man? Let's take a closer look at this issue.

Years of childhood and youth

Valery Vasilyevich Borshchev is a native of the village of Chernyannoye (Tambov Region). He was born on December 1, 1943 in an ordinary Soviet family. His father worked as an engineer in the military industry, and his mother worked as a civil engineer. The family often moved from place to place, so Valery repeatedly changed the schools where he studied. He received his matriculation certificate in Rostov-on-Don.

In his youth, Valery Borshchev tried to stand out from the crowd, preferring to wear exclusively stylish clothes. At the same time, the teachers of Moscow State University, where the young man went to study as a journalist, were critical of such marginality.

But in 1966 he still receives the coveted diploma.

KP

After graduating from the Faculty of Journalism, Valery Borshchev gets a job at Komsomolskaya Pravda. He becomes an employee of the Institute "Public Opinion" (one of the structures of the "KP"), and after a while the journalist is transferred to the department of Komsomol life and youth problems, where he works as a correspondent. The heroes of his publications were people who secretly opposed themselves to the existing regime. Valery Borshchev often went on business trips initiated by complaints. Once he met in the provincial Rubtsovsk with a man who was the author of an angry letter against the Communists, written after the political events in Czechoslovakia. Another time, upon arrival in the city of Biysk, he managed to talk with young people who came up with an unusual charter of the Komsomol, which did not quite correspond to the tasks of building a socialist state.

New Horizons

In the 70s, events take place,who changed the vector of career development in the life of Valery Vasilyevich.

Eminent Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn is being expelled from the Soviet Union. In protest, he decides to break off labor relations with Komsomolskaya Pravda. He meets and talks with academician Andrei Sakharov on the topic of observing the rights of a Soviet citizen, after which a real revolution takes place in his inner mind. But in 1975, he was not yet ready to deal totally with the problem of lack of rights in the USSR. After being fired from Komsomolskaya Pravda, he finds a job at the Soviet Screen newspaper. For several years he has been interviewing pop and movie stars: Alla Pugacheva, Bulat Okudzhava, Rolan Bykov, Oleg Tabakov and others.

Beginning of human rights activities

In parallel with this, Valery Borshchev, whose biography is of great interest to many, begins active work as part of the Committee for the Rights of Believers. In a new capacity for himself, he began to provide assistance to political prisoners and their relatives. In particular, the exiles received food, literature, money.

Valery Vasilievich often went to the places of detention himself, handed over the parcel to the prisoners and personally asked them how the rights of those held in prisons were respected. However, the Soviet elite was not going to make concessions to political prisoners and only intensified the fight against dissidents. This position of officials only disappoints the novice human rights activist: heput the party card on the table and stopped working in the Soviet Screen. Friends-actors from the Taganka Theater - Vladimir Vysotsky and Valery Zolotukhin offered Borshchev to temporarily work as a fireman in the Melpomene temple. After some time, he had a chance to try on himself such professions as a sander, a high- altitude painter, and a carpenter. Valery Vasilyevich even managed to work in an underground printing house, where religious literature was produced. It was created by one of the human rights activist's friends, Viktor Burdyug.

Opala

In the early 80s, security officers identify the ideologues of the Committee for the Rights of Believers and put handcuffs on them. To avoid arrest, Borshchev leaves the capital for a while. He came out of hiding only after the trial of dissident Gleb Yakunin took place.

But even after that, Valery Borshchev (human rights activist) was under the watchful eye of the KGB, which in the mid-80s warned him to stop anti-Soviet propaganda.

Moscow Helsinki Group

He entered this human rights organization shortly after its revival. In 1987, Valery Borshchev took part in the first human rights forum, while law enforcement agencies then warned that the organizers of the event would face criminal prosecution. At the same time, the human rights activist did not leave the profession of a journalist, working in the late 80s as the editor of the magazine "Knowledge is Power".

Work in power structures

Of course, the old government was objectionable to Valery Borshchev. Politics entered intosphere of his professional interests, already when the USSR was living out its last days. In the early 90s, he took a deputy chair in the Moscow City Council (the predecessor of today's Moscow City Duma). Some time later, in the legislature of the capital, he already headed the Commission in charge of issues in the field of religious freedom, conscience, mercy and charity.

In 1994, Borshchev became a State Duma deputy. In this capacity, he helped to pass the legislative act "On charitable activities and charitable organizations." Valery Vasilievich also de alt with problematic cases of religious organizations and public associations, oversaw the sphere of observance of the rights of prisoners serving sentences in places of deprivation of liberty. An interesting fact: when the war broke out in Chechnya, Borshchev was one of the first to try to persuade the separatist Dzhokhar Dudayev to abandon the idea of \u200b\u200bseparating the republic from Russia. But unfortunately, such an initiative was not successful, and blood began to be shed in Chechnya.

ONC

In 2008, Valery Vasilievich began to lead the Public Supervisory Commission of the capital. As an experienced and eminent expert in defending the rights of an ordinary citizen, he absolutely deservedly took this responsible post. But among his colleagues there are people who believe that Valery Borshchev is a human rights activist by order. They motivate this position by the fact that the head of the PMC of Moscow pays attention to specific personalities and ignores the problems of other prisoners. In particular, we are talking about Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a pre-trial detention center in 2009. It is to this case that the maximum attention from Valery Vasilyevich is riveted. “But what about the problems of other prisoners?” - human rights activists are perplexed. In addition, they question Borshchev's special interest in protecting destructive sects. Or maybe the human rights activist is acting to please the West? Such an idea sometimes occurs to Borshchev's colleagues.

Even the members of the commission cannot understand why the head of their structure is in no hurry to adopt the regulations of the PMC.

Undoubtedly, Valery Borshchev did a great job in protecting the rights of people. Who is he and whose interests does he defend? One way or another, but for some this question has become a cornerstone in assessing his work.

One thing is clear: he never divided people according to social, professional and ethnic affiliation, recognizing the same amount of rights for everyone.

The human rights activist is married. He has a daughter. In his spare time he prefers to go fishing.