Anatoly Marchenko

Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko (Анато́лий Ти́хонович Ма́рченко, 23 January 1938 – 8 December 1986) was a Soviet dissident, author, and human rights campaigner, who became one of the first two recipients (along with Nelson Mandela) of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament when it was awarded to him posthumously in 1988.

Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko was born on 23 January 1938, in Barabinsk, Novosibirsk Oblast, in the Siberia region of the Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, to illiterate railway workers from a peasant background.

His father, Tikon Akhimovich, was a locomotive fireman, and his mother was a train station cleaner.

The couple had two other sons, one of whom died in infancy.

His grandfather had been shot by Aleksandr Kolchak.

Marchenko left school two years short of the normal full secondary education in the Soviet Union.

He then joined the Komsomol, and became a shift foreman for an oil drilling group, which travelled around the Siberia region.

The Gulag labor camp system operating in the Soviet Union had been heavily associated with General Secretary Joseph Stalin, whose death in March 1953 started an amnesty limited to non-political prisoners and for political prisoners sentenced to 5 or fewer years.

Most of those released were convicted for common crimes; however the release of political prisoners started in 1954 and became widespread.

Stalin's successor as General Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalinism in his Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, which coupled the amnesty with mass political rehabilitation.

The Soviet state continued to maintain the extensive camp system for a while after Stalin's death, although the period saw the grip of the camp authorities weaken, and a number of conflicts and uprisings occurred in this time.

Marchenko, originally an apolitical oil driller from a poor background, turned to writing and politics as a result of several episodes of incarceration starting in 1958, during which he began to associate with other dissidents.

In 1958, while on a job at the Karaganda power station, Marchenko ran into trouble which resulted in his first period of imprisonment: some exiled Chechens began a fight with some of the Russian workers in the hostel where Marchenko was staying.

Marchenko broke up the fight, but after the fight was over and most of the combatants had left, "the police indiscriminately arrested the innocent and the guilty"; they were all sent to the Karaganda labour camps.

Two-years later, Marchenko escaped from the camp, just as his sentence was about to be overturned.

Seeing no future for himself in the Soviet Union, he tried to escape over the border into Iran; however, he was captured on October 29 near Ashkabad, just short of the border.

Marchenko was subsequently tried for treason on 2 March 1961; the charge of treason was because he supposedly intended to engage in work against the Soviet Union for money.

In reality, it was payback for his attempt to leave.

On 3 March 1961, he was convicted for treason and was sentenced to six-years in labour camp, officially designating Marchenko a political prisoner, not an ordinary criminal as he was previously.

After several months in a series of transit prisons, Marchenko was moved to a labour camp in Mordovia where attempted to escape, but did not succeed, and as a result he was sentenced to serve three-years of his sentence in a regular prison, which he spent in the infamous Vladimir Prison.

While in Vladimir, he went on a long hunger strike, a tactic he would often later repeat.

In 1963, Marchenko was moved from Vladimir back to the labour camp in Mordovia.

While there, in March 1966, he survived a bout of meningitis with almost no medical care, which caused problems with his ears which would trouble him for the rest of his life.

During his time in the camps Marchenko educated himself, reading a number of accessible socio-political works, including the complete works of the communist figures Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin.

Marchenko also met a number of intellectual political prisoners, including Yuli Daniel.

Marchenko was released on 2 November 1966, and spent months travelling through the Russian SFSR, trying to find a locality which would allow him register to live there.

He finally succeeded in being allowed to register in his birthplace Barabinsk, and later in Alexandrov, Vladimir Oblast.

In 1968, in the run-up to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Marchenko wrote an open letter predicting the invasion.

From May 1968, while still formally living in Alexandrov, Marchenko was working in Moscow as a loader, the only job available to him, even though doctors had warned him not to do hard manual labour.

During this time he had met several fellow dissidents, including Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of his associate Yuli Daniel, who were in the process of legal separation.

Marchenko was determined to write a record of the camps, and his fellow prisoners, and he enlisted their aid in his project.

They also helped him receive medical care, both for his ears, and for problems with internal bleeding in his stomach.

Marchenko gained international fame in 1969 through his book, My Testimony, an autobiographical account written after his arrival in Moscow in 1966 about his then-recent sentences in Soviet labour camps and prisons.

After limited circulation inside the Soviet Union as samizdat, the book caused a sensation in the West after it revealed that the Soviet gulag system had continued after the death of Joseph Stalin.

Arrested again, he was released in the early 1970s, but in 1974 he was interrogated and internally exiled to Irkutsk Oblast.

In 1976, Marchenko became one of the founding members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, before being again arrested and imprisoned in 1981, where he kept writing throughout his prison time, publicizing the fate of Soviet political prisoners.

Having spent about 20 years in all 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."

becoming one of the Soviet Union's "perpetual prisoner[s]".

Marchenko died at age 48 in Chistopol prison hospital, as a result of a three-month-long hunger strike with 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-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to authorize the large-scale amnesty of political prisoners in 1987.