Natalya Gorbanevskaya (1936-2013) and the Beginnings of Soviet Russian Civil Society

Research project by Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg
 

Natalya Gorbanevskaya was a poet as great as Joseph Brodsky and a human rights activist as important and fearless as Andrei Sakharov. Yet she has received neither the Nobel Prize for Literature nor the Nobel Peace Prize and is largely unknown, at least in the Western world. In 1968, she almost single-handedly founded the underground newspaper "Chronicle of Current Events", which from then on reported on political trials and prisoners in the USSR. Unlike most of the unofficial media, which the KGB immediately crushed, the newspaper was able to publish 63 issues until 1983 and is today considered the beginning of Russian press freedom. Gorbanevskaya was solely responsible for the first ten issues; then she was arrested. Also in 1968, she was one of eight people who protested on Red Square on 25 August against the suppression of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact troops. This was a unique event, because never before or since have dissidents in the USSR dared to protest in public with banners.
Gorbanevskaya's story is also special because she was not sentenced to prison, camp detention and banishment like the others, but was sent to a psychiatric prison where she was forcibly treated with psychotropic drugs for nine months. Because she had appeared at the demonstration with her three-month-old son, the court had declared her insane. After her early release in 1972, which was the result of pressure from home and abroad, she realised in view of the arrest of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, at which she was present, that she had to leave the country if she did not want to disappear in the psychiatric ward for the next time and then for ever. From 1976, she lived in Paris with her two sons, whom she raised alone, where she continued to write poetry and eventually worked as deputy editor-in-chief for several central émigré organs such as Kontinent, Pamjat' and Russkaya Mysl', translated Solidarnosc texts from Polish and wrote for the Polish émigré press. In 2005 she took Polish citizenship, where she was revered as much as in the Czech Republic. In August 2013, 45 years after her first protest, she returned to Red Square for a commemorative demonstration to again speak out for freedom and democracy in Russia. This time the police did not arrest her, but her fellow demonstrators. In November 2013, she died unexpectedly in Paris at the age of 77. Poland and the Czech Republic sent their ambassadors to her funeral at the Père Lachaise cemetery, Russia did not.