Zoya Krakhmalnikova was a dissident Soviet writer and Orthodox Christian activist who, after suffering for her faith under communism, brought her unflinching moral gaze to bear on some of the most troubling questions facing post-Soviet Russia.

Born in 1929 in Kharkov, Ukraine, she graduated in 1954 from the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. Her early career was spent in academia and publishing. She was a prolific author, and had achieved success and acceptance by the intellectual and academic elite relatively early in life, but in 1971 everything changed. It was then that she converted to Orthodoxy.

The Soviet Union’s early brutal years of persecution of the faithful were behind it, but it was officially an atheist country, and there were heavy penalties for the promotion of religion. Three years later Krakhmalnikova was dismissed from her post at the Academy of Sciences, and subsequently banned from publishing within the Soviet Union.

A writer by nature, she felt there was no option but to continue to write. If not for the public she once had, then for herself, for the desk drawer, for the underground network of authors and readers who risked their freedom for the sake of the printed word. She began her career as a “samizdat” author.

Samizdat involved the unofficial publishing, often through multiple typed copies, or hand-copied texts, and circulation of these unsanctioned, uncensored texts within the Soviet Union and abroad. There were severe penalties of imprisonment, hard labour and exile for such activities.

Krakhmalnikova’s early samizdat work was primarily concerned with what she termed the problem of religion in the Soviet Union. In 1976 she edited Nadezhda (Hope), a collection of spiritual writings. While it did not have an explicit anti-Soviet political agenda, its existence was itself a challenge to, and a contravention of, Soviet law. She included within it not just her own works but texts by Orthodox figures not widely known within the Soviet Union, and it was endorsed by the Orthodox Church in exile.

In 1982 she was finally arrested and sentenced to one year in prison followed by five years in exile in the Altai region.

Freed by Mikhail Gorbachev in June 1987, she remained uncompromising in her views. “Unless we return to Christian civilisation, we will not renew our society. Our Russian culture was the achievement of the Orthodox religion, but this was destroyed under Stalinism.”

She was no less firm when, in the early 1990s, evidence emerged of the penetration of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy by the KGB. She demanded a full investigation into what she saw as the ultimate betrayal of the faithful by those who were supposed to be their guides.

She was married to the human rights activist and fellow dissident

Felix Svetov, who died in 2002. She is survived by her daughter, Zoya Svetova, a leading journalist.

Zoya Aleksandrovna Krakhmalnikova, dissident Soviet writer and Orthodox Christian activist, was born on January 14, 1929. She died on April 17, 2008, aged 79