It is with great sorrow that we report on the loss on December 5, 2016 of Sergey Khakhayev (b. 1938), who has been the chairman of St. Petersburg Association “Memorial” for many years. He was a political prisoner in the Soviet-era, a man of the highest integrity and of a rare capacity for solidarity. Other people, both historians and his colleagues, are in a better position to speak about his biography and the merits of his life, and they will no doubt do so. But for us at ADC “Memorial”, Sergey Khakhayev was a courageous one-man “support group”: he was the only member of the St. Petersburg human rights council who had attended all the court hearings in legal case against our “ill-fated” organization, and he came to all the pickets that we held, from the very first to the last one.
Sergey Khakhayev always took responsibility, in a very modest, but perfect fashion. It was impossible to imagine him saying: “Why me?” There was no such other person – and there will be none…