WASHINGTON, April 6. /TASS/. The ashes of Soviet dissident and Russian human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva were buried at the Rock Creek cemetery in Washington, DC, TASS reported from the scene on Saturday.
The burial service was conducted by Very Reverend Viktor Potapov, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. The funeral was attended by about 30 people, mostly relatives and friends, including her son Mikhail Alekseev.
At the cemetery were buried her mother Valentina Yefimenko, second husband Nikolay Williams and son Sergei Alekseev.
Alekseeva, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights and the chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, died aged 91 in Moscow on December 8, 2018.
Lyudmila Alekseeva was born on July 20, 1927. In 1950, she graduated from the History Department of Moscow State University and started working as a history teacher and then as a science editor of the archaeology and ethnography desk of the Nauka (Science) publishing house. In 1970-1977, Alekseeva worked at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences at the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences.
Alekseeva joined the human rights movement in 1966. In 1977, she was forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The dissident settled in the United States and authored some research into the history of dissident movement in the Soviet Union. Alekseeva returned to Russia in 1993 and three years later headed the oldest human rights organization - the Moscow Helsinki Group. In 2002, she joined the Russian Presidential Commission for Human Rights, which was transformed into the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights in 2004.