Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya (; 17 May 1950 – 12 July 2014) was a Soviet dissident, writer and liberal politician. She was the founder and the chairwoman of the Democratic Union party and a member of the editorial board of The New Times. Biography Novodvorskaya was born in 1950 in Baranavichy, Byelorussian SSR to a Jewish engineer, Ilya Borisovich (Boruchovich) Burshtyn, and a pediatrician, Nina Feodorovna Novodvorskaya, who came from a noble Russian family. Her parents divorced in 1967; Ilya Borisovich later emigrated to North America. Novodvorskaya was active in the Soviet dissident movement since her youth, and first imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in 1969, when she was 19, for distributing leaflets that criticized the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The leaflets included her poetry about the Soviet Communist Party: ... Thank you Party For all the falsehood and lies, For all the denunciations and informers, For the shots in Prague’s square, For all the lies you’ve yet to tell. For the paradise of factories and of flats, All built on crimes in the torture Chambers of yesterday and today And for our broken and black world. Thank you Party For our bitterness and despair, For our shameful silence, Thank you Party. ... She was arrested and imprisoned at a Soviet psychiatric hospital and, like many other Soviet dissidents, diagnosed with "sluggish schizophrenia". In the early 1990s, psychiatrists of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia proved that the claim of her mental illness was bogus. She described her experience in her book Beyond Despair. Based on the materials of the case, the Moscow prosecutor's office of the USSR compiled the following certificate (revealed only in 1999): Novodvorskaya stood as a Democratic Union candidate in the 1993 Russian legislative election in a single-mandate district as part of the Russia's Choice bloc, and she also contested the 1995 Russian legislative election on the list of the Party of Economic Freedom. She was not elected in either election, and never held public office. In 2009, Novodvorskaya published an autobiographical book, Farewell of Slavianka. Views Novodvorskaya self-identified primarily as a liberal politician and was described by her colleagues as "a critic of Russian realities in the best traditions of Pyotr Chaadayev, Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen". She was strongly critical of Chechen Wars, Vladimir Putin's domestic policies, and the rebirth of Soviet propaganda in Russia. Her consistent criticism of Russia's past and present, of political