How Famous Dissident And Baranovichi Native Valeria Novodvorskaya Handed Out $40,000 To Journalists
- 4.03.2026, 12:38
The unknown story.
Former Russian deputy prime minister, businessman and public figure Alfred Koch actively supported the democratic movement in Russia and provided financial assistance to Boris Nemtsov. Among his close acquaintances was the Soviet dissident, a native of the Belarusian Baranovichi Valeria Novodvorskaya. Alfred Koch told this in an interview with Yury Dudy.
Dudy asked Koch whether his perception of Novodvorskaya had changed over time, especially since she was one of the first to warn of Putin's danger. Koch replied that there had been no rethinking: he had always considered her an outstanding personality and treated her with great warmth. According to him, she was a person "not of this world," devoid of self-serving motives. Once, having given her a large sum of money for her anniversary - about 40 thousand dollars - he learned that she distributed these funds to journalists of the magazine "Novoe Vremya". Koch recalled that he even reproached her for this, but Novodvorskaya explained that she could not do otherwise because she considered these people her comrades.
When asked how close her assessment of Putin was to him at the time, Koch admitted that at the time he thought that she was somewhat overblown, although he believed that the direction of her criticism was correct. Now, he said, he does not think so: "Putin has reached her standard - he did not reach it then, but now he has."
Valeria Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya was born in 1950 in Baranovichi. Already in 1969 in Moscow, she organized an underground group to fight the communist regime, for which she was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. Later she was repeatedly persecuted by the Soviet authorities. In 1992, she founded the Democratic Union party, later the Western Choice party. Novodvorskaya remained a principled and uncompromising critic of the Russian authorities and Vladimir Putin until her death in July 2014.