May 23, 1996
Drowned in Bali Kronid Lyubarsky — Soviet human rights activist and samizdat publisher, author of the idea of Political Prisoner's Day.
Born in 1934, in Pskov. Both parents were of noble origin.
In 1938, my father, who worked as a department head at a tool factory, was arrested for "counterrevolutionary activity." However, he was fortunate to be released in 1940, during the "shift change." Yezhova и Beria. Immediately after this, the family moved to Simferopol.
I was practically born a dissident – in a family where a critical attitude towards the regime was instilled in me with my mother’s milk.
In 1956, after graduating from the Astronomy Department of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University, he worked at the Ashgabat Observatory. In 1961, he went on an expedition to the Tunguska meteorite impact site.
In 1966, he defended his PhD dissertation at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Moscow State University. He worked at the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and participated in organizing space missions to Mars.
While still a student, he signed the first open collective letter in the post-Stalin era to the newspaper Pravda in support of the writer Vladimir Pomerantsev.
I was lucky: I didn’t have the period of opening my eyes, the epiphany of the 20th Congress, I knew and understood everything before
On the day of Stalin's death, my friend and I managed to buy a bottle of wine at the last minute and drank it in joy
He was friends with the "sixties generation" and was one of the leading samizdat publishers. He cited "aesthetic contradictions" as the reason for his opposition to the Soviet regime.
The system is so deeply repulsive that one day you feel it is impossible to exist in it.
In 1972 he was arrested in connection with the Chronicle of Current Events case (the first independent Soviet information bulletin, published since 1968).
I was charged with only a small portion of the literature—the investigators couldn't process the enormous amount of literature that was available. One of them told my wife that I was the biggest self-publisher.
He was accused of anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to five years in a maximum security camp. He served his sentence in Mordovia and in Vladimir.
In 1897, Lenin was sentenced to three years of exile in Shushenskoye for founding the "Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class." Who was more dangerous: Lenin to the Tsarist regime or me to the Soviet regime?
(from the final statement in court)
On October 30, 1974, exactly two years after his sentence, he and other prisoners from Mordovia and Perm went on a hunger strike. The date was chosen deliberately: they wanted to commemorate the deaths of political prisoners on the eve of the main Soviet holiday, November 7.
Since 1991, Russia has commemorated the victims of political repression on this day.
During Lyubarsky's imprisonment, his wife was demoted at work, and his daughter was not accepted into college.
In 1977, shortly after his release, new charges were brought against him—for parasitism, violating probation rules, and, again, for "anti-Soviet agitation." That same year, he and his family left the Soviet Union. He was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. From 1978 onward, he lived in West Germany.
In exile, he published the newsletter "Vesti iz SSSR," the annual "Lists of Political Prisoners in the USSR," and the magazine "Strana i Mir." In 1989, he joined the Moscow Helsinki Group and later became its chairman.
In 1990, he returned to Moscow as a member of the International Commission investigating the circumstances of the death of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (he died in 1947 in Lubyanka prison).
In August 1991, he defended the White House in Moscow. In 1992, his citizenship was restored.
In 1993, he returned to Russia permanently with his family. He edited the magazine "Novoye Vremya" (New Time) and participated in the drafting of the "Law on Citizenship of the Russian Federation." He authored several articles of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, including those on freedom of movement and choice of residence.
In 1994, he resigned from the Public Chamber in protest against the war in Chechnya.
He died in the Indian Ocean after going for a swim before speaking at an Indonesian symposium.
