When philosopher Hannah Arendt talked about heroes, she meant not so much warriors or statesmen as brave ordinary people who resisted the Eichmannian temptation to “do their duty” as the wheels of an evil bureaucratic machinery: train drivers who refused to take people to death camps, or clerks who defied the orders of the totalitarian madmen. Under not quite as dramatic but nevertheless comparable circumstances, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the fragile 82-year old veteran human rights activist, personifies such grassroots heroism in our times in one of the remaining authoritarian regimes in Europe.