There are some people it’s hard to write about in the past tense. For me, Natalya Belitzer is one of them. We could talk for hours. Our last such conversation took place in the ATR hallway just before the big war.

A woman from Moscow who became a resident of Kyiv and later a Ukrainian. Her name has been known to most Crimean Tatars for half a century, as she has been defending this repressed people since the late 1970s.

Belitzer left academia to devote herself to human rights and never ceased to defend them, neither during the years of perestroika nor during the period of Ukrainian independence. She possessed a superpower — the courage to speak her mind regardless of who was in power. The Crimean Tatar issue had been deliberately marginalized for years, and in Kyiv, people knew about our people only from reports and briefings by the SBU (which, as it turned out in 2014, consisted of 90% Russian agents). Belitzer was convinced that without the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet dissident movement would not have been so powerful. Tens of thousands of exiles supported the idea of returning to their homeland, and this made the human rights movement a mass movement — and for the communists, that mattered. Like the late Ayşe Seytmuratova, Natalya Belitzer watched with alarm as Stalinism was revived in Russia. Both human rights activists considered Putin’s regime more terrifying than the Soviet one, and spoke openly about this even before the occupation of Crimea. The Brezhnev era, at least on the surface, was based on an idealistic ideology, whereas the current regime has combined the totalitarian practices of bolshevism in politics with capitalism in the economy.

Belitzer did not believe that change could be achieved through revolution. However, she saw the need for true human rights defenders who would constantly remind the authorities and society that dictatorship is not a genetic disease, and that madness can take hold of any society.

Last year, Natalya Belitzer entrusted CEMAAT with publishing four volumes of her memoirs about the Soviet era. We had planned together that she would also write about another period — one that, on the surface, seemed recent but requires reevaluation: the early years of independence of Ukraine, 1991–2000. But these plans will never come to fruition now