Lyubov Kovalevskaya

Lyubov Aleksandrovna Kovalevskaya (, ; born 6 January 1953) is a Soviet and Ukrainian journalist. She became well known following the Chernobyl disaster for articles she had published raising concerns about the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant prior to the explosion. In 1991, Kovalevskaya received the International Women's Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award.

Biography Kovalevskaya was born in the village of Yerki in Sverdlovsk Oblast in what was then the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1976, she graduated from the Nizhny Tagil State Socio-Pedagogical Institute, and spent time teaching at a rural school near Alapayevsk.

In 1977, Kovalevskaya moved to Pripyat, Kyiv Oblast in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, where she worked as a teacher. In 1979, she became the editor of Tribuna Enerhetika , the newspaper of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Kovalevskaya was in Pripyat during the explosion and received a dose of radiation; she was later diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Following the disaster, she was evacuated to Kyiv, where she studied the social, environmental and political impacts of the explosion, including by making over 30 visits to the exclusion zone. She went on to take part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in Germany and was persecuted by the KGB for her public criticisms of the Soviet nuclear programme.

Between 2000 and 2001, Kovalevskaya worked for the Ukrainian newspaper The Day. In 2003, she moved to Ryazan in Russia.