She endured arrests, punitive psychiatry, harassment, and political persecution, yet never abandoned her convictions. Without sparing a single ounce of her will, she fought those whom she regarded as enemies of freedom and human dignity. To some she was a radical; to others, a symbol of resistance. Yet even her opponents rarely questioned her integrity or personal courage.
Valeriya Ilyinichna lived a life of struggle and left this world too soon, never seeing Russia become the country she dreamed it could be. Yet she left behind more than articles, speeches, and books. She left behind her political and moral testament.
From the unpublished book My Carthage Must Be Destroyed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 lines worthy of 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 that must give way to a young, brilliant, noble Rome — the democracy of the West, our Atlantis.”
From Valeriya Novodvorskaya’s unpublished book My Carthage Must Be Destroyed.
This passage perhaps allows us to understand Novodvorskaya better than many biographies and memoirs. There are no political compromises in it, no attempt to please the reader or soften her views. Here, Novodvorskaya appears exactly as she was throughout her life — uncompromising, romantic, maximalist, and convinced that freedom is worth any sacrifice.
For her, Carthage was not an ancient city but a metaphor for fear, unfreedom, state violence, and the imperial past. Therefore, her famous formula about the destruction of Carthage was not a call for destruction in itself, but a call to overcome the legacy that, in her view, prevented Russia from becoming a free country.
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 Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya believed until her very last day.