Former Soviet dissident Sergei Khodorovich died in Paris on September 21, 2025, at the age of 85.
Sergei was one of those courageous dissidents who resisted Soviet power in the 1970s and 1980s. For five years, from 1977 until his arrest in 1983, he was in charge of the Fund for Assistance to Political Prisoners and Their Families, set up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn with the royalties from the many translations of The Gulag Archipelago. Until 1980, Sergei co-directed the Fund with Arina Guinzburg. After Arina was forced to emigrate, Sergei ran the Fund on his own.
The Fund helped hundreds of prisoners in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states by sending parcels, paying for the often very long journeys of families visiting their loved ones in prison camps, covering legal fees, and helping the families of prisoners who had been deprived of their resources.
Sergei played a key role in reestablishing the Fund’s underground networks in Ukraine, which had been dismantled by the KGB. “There had been many arrests and all our links with Ukraine had been cut. We no longer had anyone to send money to on the ground to pass on to the families of political prisoners. We had to rebuild everything. I was responsible for restoring the Fund’s work in Ukraine. We had to find people we could send money to, who knew who needed help. We also had to find a way to get the money there and create an atmosphere that would allow the network to function properly1.”
By committing himself to helping political prisoners, Sergei knew what awaited him: his predecessors at the head of the Fund had been sent to a camp (Alexander Guinzburg), into internal exile (Malva Landa), or forced into exile (Tatiana Khodorovitch, Kronid Lioubarski, and Arina Guinzburg).
“In the end, what is existence? We die sooner or later, anyway, the difference is not great. Trying to escape the dangers in this life is not worth it. If we live according to God’s commandments, whatever happens to us, well, in the end, we die anyway,” Sergei confided years later.
Sergei was arrested in 1983, accused of “systematically spreading falsehoods slandering the Soviet system.”
His preventive detention in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, prior to a sham trial, was particularly harsh: he was systematically beaten by common law prisoners at the request of KGB investigators who were preparing his trial and demanding that Sergei cooperate with them. He refused to do so, even refusing to answer questions during interrogations and at his trial.
At the time, the KGB had just broken a Fund activist in Leningrad, Valery Repin, who had cracked in prison and made a public confession on Soviet television. After this success, the goal was to break Sergei and get him to collaborate.
“When, long before, I imagined this way of ‘working’ by investigators, I thought it was impossible to endure. When it happened to me, I also thought it was impossible to resist. And after the fact, I wonder with amazement how it was possible to resist,” Sergei Khodorovitch would say years later.
Sergei was sentenced to three years in a harsh prison camp in Norilsk, beyond the Arctic Circle.
During his detention, the authorities persecuted him relentlessly and he broke all records for time spent in solitary confinement: “I once spent 87 days in a row in solitary confinement, 45 of them alone, in constant cold. They put me in such a state that my legs swelled up, I lost consciousness, and I caught tuberculosis.”
Just as his release was approaching, Sergei was accused of breaking camp rules and a new trial was prepared for him. He then spent 45 days locked in a windowless cell in the cold. “If you sit down, you start to freeze. You start to walk, but you no longer have the strength to put one foot in front of the other. How can anyone endure that for 45 days? It’s very hard to imagine. Well, it turns out that humans can endure that too.”
In April 1986, Sergei was sentenced to a new term. ”It was just before my scheduled release date. A few days before, my trial was held inside the camp itself. They added three years to my sentence. But perestroika had begun, and I only served one more year.”
In 1987, Sergei was released as part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy. He settled in Paris. In exile, Sergei Khodorovitch began painting still lifes, landscapes, bouquets… He exhibited in Paris, selling his paintings on Sundays on Boulevard Quinet at the Marché de la Création… He received strong support for his work from a leading figure in non-conformist Soviet art, the painter Edik Steinberg.
But Sergei never really adapted to this new life that began just after his release from the camps.
This is evidenced by the memory of Zara Mourtazalieva, a young Chechen refugee in Paris after eight and a half years in a camp for a case fabricated by Putin’s FSB, who met Sergei Khodorovitch about ten years ago. “One day, after a walk in the forest, he walked me home and I asked him: Sergei, how did you manage to go on living after everything you’ve been through? He smiled and replied: ‘I didn’t manage. You just have to go on living, Zara, there’s no choice.’”
“Sergei was a man of honor, duty, and incomparable courage,” said Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s widow, who was the Fund’s representative abroad.
All those who knew Sergei during the Soviet era or in exile would agree with this description. Having had the good fortune to be his friend during his years in Moscow and then Paris, I would add that his humility and strength of character were also part of what impressed those who met him.
Nicolas Miletitch is a former journalist with Agence France-Presse. A correspondent in Moscow from 1978 to 1981, he was expelled by the Soviet authorities for what they deemed overly close contacts with dissidents. He served as AFP bureau chief in Yugoslavia and Albania (1988-1994), bureau chief in Moscow for Russia and the former USSR (1988-2001), editor-in-chief at AFP’s Paris headquarters, and once again bureau chief in Moscow from 2010 to 2018.