Her name meant “the new courtyard.”  She was one of Russia’s very last lions of freedom, and she tried all her life to urge her country to open a door onto a new courtyard, one free from the despair and wretched failure of the tsarist and Soviet past.  She was one of Barack Obama’s most severe critics.  She passed away on July 12, 2014, at the age of 64.*  She was Valeria Novodvorskaya, and hers is a loss Russia can hardly bear. Her advanced age did not prevent her from being a fully realized, modern woman.  She took up blogging and regularly wrote for the website of the maverick Moscow radio station "Echo of Moscow."  Her final blog post there, published ten days before her demise, is a succinct and devastating indictment of the people of Russia, issued not out of hatred for them, but out of faithful, desperate, unrequited love.  It is very similar to Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham...(Read Full Article)