These words are not merely wishes taken out of context. These lines and this prose reflect the very essence of the legendary Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya.
Without sparing a single ounce of her will, she fought those who had lost the moral right to call themselves citizens of their own land; those who lived day after day by informing on others, persecuting dissent, and suppressing human dignity; those who undermined the ethical and moral foundations of society.
She became a symbol of free thought and resistance. And although the very word “patriotism” has acquired different meanings for many people today, Valeriya Ilyinichna remained a true patriot of her country. She fought uncompromisingly against those whom she considered enemies of Russia, sparing neither her strength nor her own fate.
Tragically, that very devotion became one of the reasons for her untimely death. Accustomed to living through struggle and caring for others before herself, Novodvorskaya often neglected her own health. A severe infection, for which she sought medical help too late, brought her life to an end at the age of sixty-four.
Yet her legacy proved stronger than time itself. Her contemporaries remembered Novodvorskaya as an uncompromising, principled, and extraordinarily resilient dissident, who endured arrests, punitive psychiatry, harassment, and repression without ever abandoning her convictions.
She left behind not only books, articles, and speeches, but also a belief that freedom is worth any struggle, no matter how long or difficult.
From the unpublished book My Carthage Must Be Destroyed
“Our history is an eternal struggle above an eternal collapse for the right to leave the totalitarian desert and reach the Promised Land — the West, Atlanticism. In our history, cruel winds blow and bonfires burn. In it, we, the Westernizers, heirs to the Slavic and Scandinavian traditions, fight against the bearers of the Byzantine and Horde traditions, driving them out of our hearts, our genes, our memory, and our political life.
We are few; like a thin stream we make our way through the sands of a thousand years. For four centuries, beginning with the trial of Yuri Krizhanich, we have been persecuted, expelled, tortured, executed, erased, and forbidden. Yet every morning we rise again only to walk toward death every night. We pull the country behind us and write the only worthy lines in its history — with our own blood, and one day we shall not die.
And then the Statue of Liberty will stand on one of the Solovetsky Islands: above the White Sea Canal, above the Kremlin, above the Gulag and Lubyanka, as the eternal symbol of our victory. We are the West’s paratroopers on Russian soil; we came here with the Varangians in the eighth century, and we shall never surrender our bridgehead.
We destroy the Soviet past as though it were the remnants of an eternal Carthage, an Empire of Evil, which must give way to a young, brilliant, noble Rome — the democracy of the West, our Atlantis.”
In these lines we see the whole of Novodvorskaya — uncompromising, romantic, and maximalist, convinced that freedom and human dignity are worth personal sacrifice.
For her, Carthage was not an ancient city, but a symbol of unfreedom, fear, lies, and state violence, something that had to be destroyed first and foremost in the minds of people.
And perhaps no words describe her life’s journey better than the phrase most closely associated with her name:
“Russia Will Be Free.”
It was in that Russia that she believed until her very last day.