Press Release, 13.05.2025

Photo: Anatoly Marchenko / Photo from open sources

Thanks to Anatoly Marchenko, Academician Andrei Sakharov was returned from exile and a state decision was made to release all political prisoners in the Soviet Union. From Marchenko’s book “My Testimony” Soviet and European societies learned about the lives of Soviet political prisoners in the post-Stalin period. The memory of the last deceased prisoner of the Soviet camps Anatoly Marchenko has not been perpetuated in any way in the toponymy of the cities where he was born and died – in Barabinsk and Chistopol. Yabloko proposes to correct this injustice.

The leaders of the regional branches of the party Dmitry Shabanov and Ruslan Zinatullin sent appeals to the governments of the Novosibirsk Region and Tatarstan. Yabloko proposes the following:

– name streets in Barabinsk and Chistopol after Anatoly Marchenko,

– install a bust or monument in both cities,

– hang memorial plaques on buildings associated with the life and death of the dissident,

– name the Barabinsk district library and the Chistopol Central Library after Marchenko,

– hold annual cultural events in memory of the human rights defender.

Anatoly Marchenko was a human rights defender, Soviet dissident, political prisoner, writer, and the first laureate of the Andrei Sakharov Prize. He was born in 1938 in the city of Barabinsk in the Novosibirsk Region, and died in 1986 in the city of Chistopol in the Tatar ASSR after a hunger strike demanding the release of all political prisoners of the USSR.

Marchenko’s death and the public reaction to it prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to begin the process of releasing prisoners convicted under “political” articles.

Anatoly Marchenko’s grave at the Serafimovskoye Cemetery in the Chistopolsky District is included in the Unified State Register of Cultural Heritage Sites (historical and cultural monuments) of the peoples of the Russian Federation.

Earlier, Yabloko had already sent an initiative to perpetuate the memory of Anatoly Marchenko in the toponymy of Barabinsk and Chistopol to the city administrations, but there was no substantive response from officials.

Now the regional authorities must consider Yabloko’s proposals: the commission for perpetuating the memory of victims of political repression in the Novosibirsk Region and the commission for perpetuating outstanding figures of the Republic of Tatarstan.

Yabloko expresses gratitude to Sofia Fedorova, a candidate of Yabloko in Tatarstan, for preparing the appeals.