Another memoir from the late Soviet dissident (d. 1986, in a Soviet
prison), updating his acclaimed My Testimony (1969). Marchenko was
an anomaly among Soviet dissidents. Unlike figures like
Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, he hailed from a poor, uneducated
background, and, as recounted here, spent his years between prison
terms in menial labor (doing such jobs as handling 12,000 bricks a
day as part of a human conveyor belt). Yet this work speaks with
simple eloquence and clarity of the brutality of the Soviet system
as recently as in the 1970's. His descriptions of the Catch-22s of
Soviet life for a former political prisoner are nearly as painful
to read as they must have been to live through. Marchenko first
tells of his few months of freedom between prison terms, coping
with both the conventional mentality of his family ("Oh, the heck
with you," his mother chides, "and whom do you take after, such a
clever one? No one's ever been in prison; not in your father's
family, not in mine. You've been in twice, and you're still a
fool") and the exasperations of the system (he describes a vicious
circle: "the law says, get a residency permit, but the militia
refuses to issue it, knowing and deliberately milking you a
'criminal' "). The author then chronicles his frenzied attempts to
get My Testimony published (it landed him back in prison). And-last
- he describes life in the camps (a look as chilling as
Solzhenitsyn's fictional rendition). With its simple approach, this
account of a society where "nearly every Soviet citizen is in
violation of some statute" should elicit a wide readership.
Marchenko's ultimate judgment: "If we were allowed to buy pistols
and rifles, like in America, there wouldn't be anyone left to drag
the corpses off the streets." (Kirkus Reviews)
"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.
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