Press Release, 23.12.2022

Photo: Anatoly Marchenko / Photo from the family archive

Public hearings on Yabloko’s proposal to perpetuate the memory of Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko will be held in Tatarstan. This was announced by the head of the Chistopol municipal district.

Earlier the Novosibirsk and the Tatarstan branches of Yabloko proposed that the municipal authorities of Barabinsk and Chistopol install commemorative plaques on houses associated with the life and death of Anatoly Marchenko, name one of the streets in both cities after Marchenko, install a bust or monument to Anatoly Marchenko in Barabinsk and in Chistopol. Natalya Chubykina and Ruslan Zinatullin, Chairs of the Yabloko regional branches in the Novosibirsk Region and Tatarstan, also asked that a district library of the city of Barabinsk and the Central Library of the city of Chistopol be named after the Soviet dissident, as well as cultural events in memory of the human rights activist should be held. The statement was timed to coincide with the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Political Repressions, who are annually commemorated in Russia on 30 October.

It should be noted that the administration and the Council of Deputies of the city of Barabinsk, the Novosibirsk region, refused to perpetuate the memory of their famous fellow countryman, dissident and writer Anatoly Marchenko, because, in their opinion, he was not an outstanding figure and did not perform any real exploit.

Anatoly Marchenko is the last Soviet political prisoner who died in prison. According to a widespread version, it was his death after 117 days of his hunger strike that prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to begin the process of releasing prisoners convicted under political articles. In 1988, the European Parliament awarded Anatoly Marchenko (posthumously) and Nelson Mandela with the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1988.

Anatoly Marchenko was born in the city of Barabinsk, the Novosibirsk Region, on 23 January, 1938, and died on 8 December, 1986. He died in the city of Chistopol, the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, where he was serving his last, the sixth, term, after a hunger strike demanding the release of all political prisoners of the USSR.

The Yabloko branch in Tatarstan, unlike the Novosibirsk regional branch of Yabloko, will still have the opportunity to prove to the authorities and residents of the region that Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko, the laureate of The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, who died after 117 days of a hunger strike, deserves to remain in the memory of further generations.