On November 3, 2025, human rights defender, former lawmaker, and head of the Moscow Helsinki Group Valery Borshchev died. Colleagues and associates describe him as one of the central figures of Russia’s human rights movement in the late 1990s and 2000s, especially in the field of public oversight of detention facilities.
Borshchev entered human rights work in the Soviet period. After leaving Komsomolskaya Pravda in protest over the editorial board’s stance on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he became close to dissident priest Gleb Yakunin. In the years that followed, he took part in defending believers, civic activists, and people facing political persecution, while living through surveillance, threats, and the arrests of people close to him.
In the post-Soviet period, Borshchev served in many public and state bodies, from Moscow City Council and State Duma commissions to the Human Rights Council, the Moscow Helsinki Group, Memorial, Lev Ponomarev’s For Human Rights movement, and the Yabloko party. At the same time, colleagues say he never became part of the bureaucratic system and kept an independent position.
One of his life’s main achievements was the creation of Public Monitoring Commissions. Together with Sergei Kovalev, he was among the authors of the law on PMCs, which allowed independent monitors to visit prisons and pretrial detention centers. After Sergei Magnitsky’s death, Borshchev personally took part in inspections of Matrosskaya Tishina and Butyrka, gathered evidence, and publicly presented the findings.
According to Anna Karetnikova, it was Borshchev who “opened the doors” through which monitors across the country could see what was happening in detention and tell society about it.
His associates say that over the years PMC monitors helped thousands of inmates, while hundreds were quite literally saved from death. After 2016, independent oversight was rapidly curtailed, and by 2020 almost all prominent independent members had been pushed out of the commissions.
Borshchev also consistently spoke out against wars: he condemned both Chechen campaigns, criticized the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and later opposed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to Eva Merkacheva, he was seriously ill in his final year and bedridden, yet kept calling people and trying to help those in trouble until the end.