January 23, 1938
В Barabinsk (Novosibirsk region), in the family of an assistant driver, was born Anatoly Marchenko — human rights activist, writer, dissident, political prisoner.
If I were alone with my opinion, I still wouldn't give it up. Because my conscience told me so.
After finishing the eighth grade, he went to a Komsomol construction site. Novosibirsk Hydroelectric power station. Received the specialty of shift drilling foreman. Worked on the construction sites of Siberian hydroelectric power stations, in mines, and in geological exploration in Tomsk region and Karaganda State District Power Plant-1.
In 1958, at 20, after a mass brawl in a dormitory between local workers and deported Chechens - in which he did not participate - he was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. Karlage. A year later, he escaped. He hid, living without documents or a permanent job.
At 23, he was arrested while attempting to cross the Soviet-Iranian border. He received an additional six years in prison for treason.
After his release he lived in Vladimir region and worked as a loader.
During his imprisonment he met a writer Julius Daniel, And upon release, he quickly became part of the dissenting intelligentsia. In 1967, he wrote the book "My Testimony" about the post-Stalin political camps and prisons of the 1960s. His work was published in samizdat and abroad.
More than once, despair overwhelmed me. I was ready to throw myself at my captors with the sole purpose of dying. Or to maim myself, as others did before my eyes. One thing stopped me, one thing gave me the strength to live in this nightmare—the hope that I would get out and tell everyone what I had seen and experienced. I promised this to my comrades who remained behind bars, behind barbed wire, for years to come.
In 1968, the 30-year-old Marchenko, already a well-known dissident, wrote an open letter about the threat of a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He addressed it to Izvestia, the BBC, and other publications:
We've talked so much about how every nation should decide its own destiny—so why is the fate of the Czechs and Slovaks being decided not in Prague, but in Warsaw or Moscow? I'm ashamed of my country, which is once again playing the shameful role of Europe's policeman.
He was arrested for the third time for violating passport regulations. The day of his sentencing coincided with the day Soviet tanks entered the Prague
The authorities could never forgive Marchenko for his heroic deeds.
(Andrei Sakharov)
After a year in prison, he was sentenced to another two years in prison for slandering the Soviet government in the book “My Testimony.”
In 1971, after his release, he continued his human rights and journalistic work. He received urgent recommendations from the authorities to leave the USSR, but refused to do so even under the threat of further arrest.
He was convicted for the fifth time for "malicious violation of administrative supervision rules." He served a four-year exile in Eastern Siberia, along with his wife and child. He also became a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and signed an appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR calling for an amnesty for political prisoners.
Marchenko, do you understand that once you're released, you're expected to behave and think like everyone else? Freedom isn't like a prison camp, where everyone has their own opinion.
(Live like everyone else)
In 1981, he was convicted for the sixth time for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." He was sentenced to ten years in a maximum-security penal colony and five years of exile. While serving his final sentence in Chistopolskaya prison (Tatar ASSR) declared an indefinite hunger strike, demanding the release of all political prisoners in the USSR. He hunger strike lasted 117 days, during which he complained of torture—he was force-fed.
The nutritional mixture is intentionally prepared with large, lumpy food particles that don't pass through the tube, but instead get stuck in it, clogging it and preventing the nutritional mixture from reaching my stomach. Under the guise of clearing the tube, they torture me by massaging and tugging on the tube without removing it from my stomach.
His exhausted body couldn’t cope with the hunger strike – Marchenko died on December 8, 1986. In 1988, the European Parliament awarded him (along with Nelson Mandela) the first Sakharov Prize.
