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Witness History: Russia’s Democracy pioneer

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19/11/2021 GMT

Russia’s Democracy pioneer

BBC World Service - Witness History, Russia’s Democracy pioneer

Galina Starovoitova, the murdered politician who championed democracy in '90s Russia

Galina Starovoitova was Russia’s champion of human rights and most outspoken female politician until she was murdered in a contract killing outside her St Petersburg apartment.

On 20 November 1998, a pioneer of Russian democracy was assassinated. The country was awash with contract killings at the time but Galina Starovoitova’s murder sparked outrage and many saw it as an ominous turning point in Russian politics.

Born in in the Urals region in 1946, Starovoitova had a reputation for being independent, courageous and outspoken. As one of the original leaders of Russia's perestroika-era democratic movement, she was a prominent human rights advocate, working alongside Nobel Prize-winner Andrei Sakharov. 
Starovoitova first worked as an ethnographer and her studies into ethnic minorities in the USSR made her sympathetic to their desire for independence.  She so impressed Armenians in the mountainous Caucasus region, that in 1989 they elected her to represent them at the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow. After the failed 1991 coup staged by hardliners, Starovoitova served as Russian president Boris Yeltsin's adviser on ethnic issues. But she was later dismissed  by Yeltsin because of her opposition to Kremlin policy in the Caucasus. She was particularly under pressure from the lobby of Russian army generals eager to start the first Chechen War. 

Starovoitova was loathed by the nationalists in the Duma and her campaign for a lustration law, to ban former party members from holding certain jobs, enraged many Communists. She also tried to take on organised crime in her home city. 

Theories abound about who killed her and why. Some speculate it was the communists; others the nationalists; yet others are certain it was a "St Petersburg crime" - a euphemism for the city’s powerful mafia. A queue of over 20 thousand people had gathered to pay last respects as she lay in state before her funeral. Starovoitova’s son, Platon Borchevsky, now living in the UK, shares his memories of his mother’s life and death.

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