Novodvorskaya was born in 1950 to a Jewish engineer Ilya Borisovich (Boruchovich) Burshtyn and a pediatrician Nina Feodorovna Novodvorskaya who came from a noble Russian family [REF].
Novodvorskaya has been active in the Soviet dissident movement since her youth, and first imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in 1969 for distributing leaflets that criticized the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia (see Prague Spring).