To Live Like Everyone

by Anatoly Marchenko, Paul Goldberg (Translator), Andrei Sakharov (Contributor)

"By opening Anatoly Marchenko's final book, the reader will sense the fate and soul of one of the few remarkable people of our time" wrote Andrei Sakharov. Anatoly Marchenko was a working class Soviet dissident, who died for his beliefs at the hands of the Soviet state. In this poignant memoir, Marchenko completes a remarkable series of autobiographical works which started with "My Testimony" and continued with "From Tarusa to Chuna". Born to a provincial railway worker's family in Siberia, Marchenko experienced a brutish upbringing. Driven by a passionate desire to expose the seamy underside of Soviet society, he became a human-rights activist, and began his epic battle with the Soviet authorities. This is his memoir of that battle. It provides a rare insight into a world inhabited by those who live "where the asphalt ends". An afterword by Lisa Bogoraz, Marclienko's wife, completes this document of a life spent in dissent. Anatoly Marchenko was the first dissident to expose the post-Stalin system of camps and prisons. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Chistopol prison in 1986, after spending 20 of his 48 years in the Soviet penal system.

227 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko (also Anatoli Marchenko, Anatolii Marchenko, etc.) (January 23, 1938 – December 8, 1986) was an influential and well-known Soviet dissident, author, and human rights campaigner. He was the first recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament, awarded to him posthumously in 1988 (the only recipient to be honoured in this manner to date).

Initially a worker on a drilling gang, and not of intellectual background or upbringing, he became radicalized, and turned to writing and politics, after being imprisoned as a young man on trumped-up charges. During his time in the labour camps and prisons he studied, and began to associate with dissidents.

He first became widely known through his book My Testimony, an autobiographical account of his then-recent sentence in Soviet labour camps and prison, which caused a sensation when it was released in the West in 1969, after limited circulation inside the Soviet Union as samizdat. It brought home to readers around the world, including the USSR itself, that the Soviet gulag had not ended with Stalin.

He also became active in the Soviet human rights movement. He was one of the founder members of the influential and much-emulated Moscow Helsinki Group. He organized protests and appeals, and authored a number of open letters, several of which landed him in prison again.

He was continually harassed by the authorities, and was imprisoned for several different terms, spending about 20 years all told in prison and internal exile. Nathan Shcharansky said of him: "After the release of Yuri Feodorovich Orlov, he was definitely the number one Soviet prisoner of conscience."

He died in Chistopol prison hospital during his last incarceration, at the age of 48, as a result of a three month long hunger strike he was conducting, the goal of which was the release of all Soviet prisoners of conscience. The widespread international outcry over his death was a major factor in finally pushing then-General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to authorize the large-scale release of political prisoners in 1987.


More info: http://en.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/0...

Reviews

[Ondřej Puczok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Velmi zajímavé... Marčenka jako autora jsem dříve neznal a nikdy jsem o něm neslyšel. V České republice resp. Československu mu očividně vyšla jen tato jedna jediná knížka a to na začátku roku 1990 (já se k ní dostal díky velmi zajímavé babiččině knihovně, která skrývá nejedno tajemství...). Přitom se v Sovětském svazu bil za Československo a jeho popisy každodenního života v SSSR, vězeňských praktik (od smutných, tvrdých, po takové, jako je skrývání prostitutek v tajných místnostech...), pracovních táborů, stylu disidentského života (a to, jak se psaly disidentské knihy), sovětského "práva" a mnoha dalšího jsou víc než trefné. Třeba už jen to, v jakém bludném kruhu se ocitne vězeň propuštěný z lágru...

A příklad za všechno:
- Soudruhu právníku, řekněte mi, mám právo....
- Máte, soudruhu.
- Dovolte, nevíte, co chci říct. Mám právo na...
- Máte právo, máte.
- Prosím vás, poslouchejte mě. Mohu...
- Á! Ne, nemůžete.
Tak je to: právo máte, ale nemůžete.

PS: Velmi zajímavé je číst dohromady s knihou Imperium a Králíci a hroznýši - říká to o SSSR v druhé polovině 20. století víc než dost.

[Mike DePue, OFS · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author’s run-ins with the Soviet state stretch from his first imprisonment in 1958 until his death in prison in 1986 at 48 years of age. It is hardly possible to read this book without comparison to today’s Russia of Putin and Navalny. Has much really changed?

“This is no better than Stalin!” If you live in a country in which reasonably democratic and humane daily life can be taken for granted, then the matter-of-fact roll-out of the author’s travails will astound. Unless a friend is a publicly-known activist, “I dare not mention her name and must hide it behind some initials, as if she is some criminal conspirator. But if I named her, she would have problems at work and get on the KGB watch list. …By openly mentioning her name here, I would in effect be testifying against her.” (p. 129)

Clearly he didn’t battle on alone. “I marveled at our Moscow intelligentsia, its bravery, its resistance to the actions of the authorities. I, a man obviously followed by the almighty KGB, was being offered places to stay; before the agents’ eyes (and their cameras), I was being escorted from place to place, to protect me from their provocations. …They admired my courage, not noticing their own.” (p. 118)

During the sparse periods when the author wasn’t incarcerated, harassment was intense. “To this day, I am convinced that suffering only begins after release from the camps.” (p. 16)

Once again, the question can be raised legitimately: is there a substantial difference between Brezhnev and Putin?

[Cinquantaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Авторам писем, участникам митингов и собраний в поддержку политики ЦК КПСС мне хотелось бы напомнить, что все так называемые ошибки и перегибы в истории нашей страны происходили под бурные, долго не смолкающие аплодисменты, переходящие в овацию, под клики единодушного одобрения наших высокосознательных граждан.
***

Мне приходит в голову, что смысл всех этих действий, всех этих следствий и судов — тот же, что в каких-нибудь ритуальных плясках, — символический смысл. Повторение слов «клевета», «измышления», «шпионская деятельность» и тому подобных нужно вроде заклинания «сгинь, сгинь, пропади». Прокурор шаманит, а все прочее — необходимые декорации. Вот только не знаю, бывают ли при обычном шаманстве человеческие жертвоприношения.
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[AnaMejzr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Četla jsem to v češtině.
Je mi to velmi těžko zhodnotit touhle knihu. Je to výborná kniha, hodně zajímavá, ale zároveň smutná, devastující z lidského hlediska.