Sergei Mitrokhin, the leader of opposition Yabloko party, regards the death of dissident and politician Valeria Novodvorskaya as a loss for the Russian democratic movement.
"Moral boundaries and moral criteria are being intensively diluted in the present-day opposition movement. Valeria Novodvorskaya was a guarantor of these criteria. Her demise is a great loss for the democratic movement," Mitrokhin told Interfax on Saturday.
He said he had known Novodvorskaya since the late 1980s.
"She was a very original, strong person. A person of very firm political views. Probably, she was one of the most sincere and honest democrats in the history of modern Russia," Mitrokhin said.
"Novodvorskaya's consistency and strong principles played more of a moral than political role in our history. She set a high moral standard for politicians and in this sense she was an authority, in particular, for people who stood at the source of Yabloko party," Mitrokhin said.
Novodvorskaya, a dissident, opposition politician and journalist, Novodvorskaya died in Moscow on Saturday at the age of 64.
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