Personaggi: Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva.

Ms. Alexeyeva is now, by her own count, in her 43rd year of provoking official Moscow. The enemy these days is the soft authoritarian government ushered in by Vladimir V. Putin, previously the president and now prime minister, who methodically constricted the human rights movement. But long before that it was the airless confinement of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, where Ms. Alexeyeva was one of a tiny group of intellectuals who risked their lives to press for freedom and human rights.

(Russian Dissident’s Passion Endures Despite Tests)