Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of the last former Soviet dissidents active in Russian politics, died on Saturday. She was ninety-one years old.

Alexeyeva’s life can be divided into two unequal parts: her Soviet life and her anti-Soviet life. She came from Communist privilege and got her university degree in history, which is to say that she was schooled in the Soviet narration of world events. She was twenty-eight years old, married, and a mother of two when Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality—in 1956, three years after the tyrant’s death—threw that narrative into question and launched a heady period known as the Thaw. As though emerging from a deep freeze, young people in Moscow, where Alexeyeva lived, would gather to discuss ideas, literature, and history. In 1964, Khrushchev was ousted as the Soviet leader, and less than a year later the Thaw ended with the arrests of the writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, who had published their work abroad.

The trial of Daniel, who was a friend of Alexeyeva’s, and Sinyavsky launched one of the most important currents of the dissident movement: resistance in and to the courts. In the previous generation, political trials conducted in secret and in the absence of defense attorneys had sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths. Now Alexeyeva and perhaps a couple of dozen other brave souls fought for access to the courts and spread the word of what they saw. In 1968, a smaller group launched a samizdat newsletter called The Chronicle of Current Events, which was dedicated to documenting the persecution, arrests, trials, and prison conditions of those who dared to oppose the regime. Those who compiled, edited, typed, and distributed The Chronicle also faced arrest—at least eight people went to prison for their role in the publication, during the fifteen years of its existence.

Alexeyeva’s role in The Chronicle was relatively minor, which was a source of some pain to her; she once told me that she felt that the organizers hadn’t trusted her enough to bring her into the inner circle. But, in 1976, another dissident, the physicist Yuri Orlov, asked her to play a central role in an effort he had conceived: a group that would try to hold the Soviet Union to account under the Helsinki Accords, the signal agreement of the era of détente. As part of the far-ranging treaty, the Soviet Union had accepted the obligations of protecting the human rights of its citizens. Ten of these citizens would now demand that these obligations be taken seriously; Alexeyeva and other dissidents met with foreign correspondents, in Moscow, to announce the formation of the Moscow Helsinki Group, in May, 1976.

Orlov was arrested in February, 1977, and was sentenced to seven years in a labor colony, to be followed by five in internal exile. Within days of Orlov’s arrest, Alexeyeva was told that she could either leave the country or face prison herself. Like many other dissidents faced with this choice, Alexeyeva opted to leave. She and her husband, a mathematician, moved briefly to the United Kingdom and then settled in the United States, first in northern Virginia and later in upstate New York. “We live in a house in the middle of the woods, with windows close to the ground,” Alexeyeva wrote in a letter to friends in the mid-nineteen-eighties. “We live a very rustic lifestyle. Squirrels run around the property, dogs walk around. On weekdays we hear the sounds of students in the distance (this is a school campus). It’s a 30 minute walk to the train station. The ride to downtown New York is 50 minutes. I go there once a week for the radio. [Alexeyeva hosted a show on Radio Liberty.] Kolya goes once a month to visit the bookstores and his friends. We almost never visit friends. . . . Kolya says that I am a ‘workaholic,’ from the word ‘to work.’ I really do work morning till night.”

Exile proved hard. “I dream about seeing all of you here,” she wrote in the same letter. “Not because emigration is such a great thing. On the contrary, it turned out to be quite a difficult trial. Even some people who bore with dignity the trial of the camps were not able to endure emigration. But I know that all of the people to whom this letter is addressed would be able to do it, because each of you has a personal harbor—this makes the difference between enduring and not.”

Alexeyeva’s own “harbor” was a return to the study of history. She wrote a book called “Soviet Dissent,” which marked the first attempt at a comprehensive history of resistance to the regime. Published in 1985, the book challenged the prevailing media image of Soviet dissidents as Westernizing intellectuals. A majority of dissidents came from entirely different traditions: they were fighting for national liberation, ethnic-minority rights, and religious freedom. Alexeyeva detailed these struggles. The book was published in Russian five years after Wesleyan University Press released the English-language edition. (I no longer have my copy of the Russian-language edition; I sent it to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, of the protest-art group Pussy Riot, in 2013, when she was in prison and studying the history of dissent in Russia.)

Alexeyeva returned to Russia in the early nineteen-nineties as an organizer working with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The Communist Party had run the trade unions in the Soviet Union, and now, the thinking went, independent labor organizations could come into being. At the same time, the Moscow Helsinki Group—which had ceased operations in 1982, after all but three members had been arrested or forced into exile—was reconstituted. Alexeyeva became chair of the group in 1996 and retained that position until her death. The group became a leading human-rights organization in the country, and Alexeyeva became the elder stateswoman of human rights.

Alexeyeva was probably most well known in Russia in the last decade of her life. In 2009, she joined an ad-hoc group that held protests, in a central Moscow square, on the 31st of every month with thirty-one days. The day was chosen to draw attention to Article 31 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of peaceful assembly. She began by lending only her name to the protests, but on December 31st of that year she put her frail body on the line as well: she went to the protest dressed as the Snow Maiden, the granddaughter of Grandfather Frost, the Russian equivalent of Santa Claus. (Unlike his Western counterpart, Grandfather Frost delivers gifts on New Year’s Eve.) Alexeyeva was arrested and then quickly released, after the arrest began drawing international media attention. The incident, and Alexeyeva’s subsequent appearances at the protests, made her famous: a moral hero for a minority of Russians, an enemy of the state for a far larger group. She was assaulted in the street in Moscow; a pro-Kremlin youth camp displayed an image of her head impaled on a pole, along with those of several other critics of the regime.

At the same time, Alexeyeva was included in the state’s human-rights structures, such as they were. She was a member of Putin’s Human Rights Council, and she stayed a member long after many others left, criticizing the body for being a sham; Alexeyeva held to the position that no lever of power, however imperfect, was to be abandoned lightly. She finally resigned, in 2012, after the regime began systematically jailing people for protest. Still, last year she accepted Russia’s highest state honor, for her human-rights work, even as the work of the organization that she had founded, forty years earlier, had been virtually paralyzed by the Kremlin’s bureaucratic assault on civil society. In July, 2017, President Putin paid a visit to Alexeyeva on her ninetieth birthday. In a video that went viral after the visit, Alexeyeva appeared to be kissing the tyrant’s hands. The Russian Web erupted in outrage, with many of Alexeyeva’s supporters denouncing her, before they realized that the video had been doctored.

Alexeyeva was relentlessly optimistic. Even while the Kremlin fought its war against civil society, she continued to point out that human-rights organizations, and the concept of human rights itself, had become part of the Russian mainstream, in contrast to the Soviet era. She saw the state’s efforts at co-opting her as further evidence of the prestige that had accrued to human rights. She seemed to have no doubt that the arc of Russian history bent toward justice. But, when she died, Russia had more political prisoners than had been held in the Soviet Union in the final five years of its existence.