Non-runaway
Tatarstan. Chistopol. A provincial town located on the left bank of the Kama River, with a population of about 60 thousand people.
It was in this city, in a local prison, that on August 4, 1986, the 48-year-old dissident Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko went on a political hunger strike demanding the release of all political prisoners in the USSR. The hunger strike lasted 117 days. A few days after leaving the hunger strike, Marchenko felt ill. He was taken to the hospital of the Chistopol watch factory "Vostok". But it was too late. On December 8, 1986, at 23: 50 p.m., at the age of 49, Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko died, according to the official version, from acute heart failure.
Marchenko was buried at the local cemetery on December 12, 1986. A week and a half later, on December 23, Academician Andrei Sakharov returned to Moscow from exile in Gorky. On December 31, the USSR decided to release all political prisoners.
But what is surprising is that today Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko is rarely remembered. Why the authorities do not remember is clear – Marchenko's life is, by and large, a desperate criticism of the management system, criticism of the authorities. But Marchenko is rarely mentioned by opposition members who left Russia. Because Marchenko did not desert, did not run away from the USSR, although the authorities forced him to emigrate, threatening a new arrest if he refused to leave the Soviet Union.
He could have left the USSR, settled somewhere near the Warm Sea, collected humanitarian aid for Taliban terrorists, and written angry letters about bloodthirsty members of the Politburo. But Marchenko could not imagine life abroad. He stubbornly answered all hints about emigration: "Let them go where they want, and I'm here, at home." Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko stayed in the Soviet Union and fought for justice until his last breath.
And he was buried at the Seraphim cemetery in Chistopol. For those who will be brought to Chistopol, and who want to visit the grave of Anatoly Marchenko, here are the landmarks. After entering the Seraphim Cemetery, you need to walk along the Walk of Fame with the graves of Chistopol residents who died during the SVO, and reach the chapel of Seraphim of Sarov, erected in honor of one of the most revered monks of the Russian Orthodox Church. After the chapel, you need to walk another 20 meters and turn left along the passage between the graves. After about 30 meters, you need to turn right, and then you will have to make your way 15 meters through chaotic burials to get to the grave of Anatoly Marchenko.
Despite the fact that almost 39 years have passed since Marchenko's death and funeral, his grave does not look abandoned. And this is surprising, because few people in Chistopol already know that it was in this city that the last days of the life of a person who did not run away from the USSR, did not emigrate, but remained in the country and continued the struggle here, and not in a foreign country, passed. And died.
I was on a business trip to Chistopol in early autumn and asked many Chistopol residents what their city is famous for. And almost no one remembered Marchenko.
When I started asking Chistopol residents what their city is famous for, the most popular answer was this: Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin was born and raised in our city.
The second most popular watch is "Komandirskie", which is produced by the Chistopol watch Factory "Vostok". I was told that they were worn not only by all officers of the Soviet army. In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, American officers were also awarded Chistopol "Commander's" watches. It's true. In 1990, the last year before the demise of the Soviet Union, the Pentagon ordered a large batch of Commander watches with American symbols at the Chistopol factory. The order was completed just in time for the start of Operation Desert Storm.
The third most popular answer to the question of what Chistopol is famous for was that during the Great Patriotic War, Boris Pasternak lived in this city in evacuation.
Allegedly, it was in Chistopol that the writer conceived his novel "Doctor Zhivago", for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. However, Boris Leonidovich refused to receive this award. In Chistopol, in the house where the writer lived during the evacuation, the Pasternak Memorial Museum is now operating, and in the Skaryatinsky city garden in 2015, a monument to the writer was erected.
When I was in Chistopol and was standing in front of the house where Pasternak lived, I caught myself thinking that the novel "Doctor Zhivago", full of sharp plot twists, random meetings and episodes, as if strung on a skewer of the main theme of sacrifice, the life and death of ordinary people against the background of grandiose changes, is very similar to the fate of Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko, who lived his life fighting for justice and dignity, and sacrificed his life for the release of political prisoners.
At the same time, Anatoly Marchenko's childhood and youth did not presage that he would become a Soviet dissident from ordinary workers. Yes, and one of the most famous in the world.
He was born and raised in Barabinsk, Novosibirsk region. My father worked as an assistant engineer on the railway, my mother washed the floors at the station. After finishing the eighth grade, Marchenko went to Siberia on a Komsomol ticket. He worked on construction sites, got a degree in drilling foreman, went to geological exploration in the Tomsk region. He built the Karaganda State District Power Station.
In 1958, at the age of 20, he received his first prison sentence, seemingly only two years, for a mass brawl in a workers ' dormitory. Marchenko did not participate in that wall-to-wall battle between Komsomol members and deported Chechens, but the police did not investigate. A short investigation, a swift trial, a verdict. Karaganda camp. Work in gold and uranium mines.
While serving his very humane sentence, just a twopenny piece, Marchenko decided to flee the Soviet Union. The escape failed. On October 29, 1960, he was detained by border guards just a few dozen meters from the control and trace strip of the Soviet-Iranian border.
On March 3, 1961, the Supreme Court of the Turkmen SSR sentenced Anatoly Marchenko to six years in prison for treason. Marchenko was transferred from the pre-trial prison of the Ashgabat Department of the KGB to a penal colony in Mordovia. During the stage, he visited Tashkent,Alma-Ata, Semipalatinsk, Novosibirsk, Taishet, Sverdlovsk, Kazan, Ruzaevskaya transfer prisons.
It was then that the process began, succinctly formulated by Karl Marx "Being determines consciousness" or, as they say in the people, "With whom you will lead, you will gain from that".
In transit prisons, Marchenko met for the first time with prisoners convicted under political articles. In Mordovia, in Dubravlag, he met Yuli Daniel, who, along with a fellow writer Andrey Sinyavsky, was sentenced to prison camps for secretly publishing their books abroad. After his release from Dubravlag, Marchenko went to Moscow with instructions and recommendations from Daniel and other political prisoners. I met with Moscow dissidents.
In 1967, Yulia Daniel's wife Larisa Bogoraz helped Anatoly Marchenko write and edit the book "My Testimony". In this book, he described what he had experienced, seen and heard in the political camps of Dubravlag and in the Vladimir Central from 1960 to 1966.
The book was sold first in samizdat, and then abroad. In 1969, The Testimony was published in emigrant publishing houses in France, Germany, and the United States. At the same time, the book was translated into many foreign languages.
Together with the book, Anatoly Marchenko became widely known both in Soviet dissident circles and among human rights activists in the West. But along with his fame, the KGB paid close attention to him. A series of arrests, exiles, and prison sentences began. For violation of the passport regime, for malicious violation of the rules of administrative supervision.
I repeat, Anatoly Marchenko was repeatedly offered to leave the USSR. These offers began to come especially often after Anatoly Marchenko and Larisa Bogoraz got married, and their son Pavel was born.
Before the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Marchenko and Bogoraz again hinted that they were ready to provide a humanitarian corridor to leave the USSR. But he refused to leave the country.
After the Olympics, Marchenko was no longer treated with ceremony. On March 17, 1981, he was arrested again. The Soviet government did not even look for formal reasons. Marchenko was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda in texts written after 1975.
The dissident was transferred to the Vladimir Central. He refused to participate in the investigation, saying that he considers the CPSU and KGB to be criminal organizations. The Vladimir Regional Court sentenced Anatoly Marchenko to 10 years in prison to serve his sentence in a high-security penal colony.
After the Perm political camps, on October 25, 1985, he was taken to Chistopol to continue serving his sentence. A few months later, on August 3, 1986, another dissident and political prisoner, Mark Morozov, died in one of the cells of the Chistopol prison. Morozov's death was the detonator.
On August 5, Anatoly Marchenko went on an indefinite political hunger strike demanding an end to the extermination of political prisoners and their release. The hunger strike lasted 117 days.
The Chistopol prison still operates today, and it is called SIZO No. 5 of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for Tatarstan. The prison has a museum, which contains many exhibits about the history of the institution, which began in 1856. Then it was a transit prison for prisoners traveling in stages to Orenburg and the Urals. During the Great Patriotic War, about two thousand prisoners from Moscow prisons were transferred here. And here, in Chistopol, on the eve of the 1980 Olympics, many political prisoners were sent who were serving time in the Vladimir prison.
The museum's exhibits mainly tell about the employees who served here from tsarist times to the present. There are no stands in the museum about the author of the adventures of the brave soldier Schweik, the Czech writer Jaroslav Hashik, who in 1918, being captured by the whites, spent several weeks in one of the cells of the Chistopol prison, but managed to escape. Not about the future Israeli minister Natan Sharansky. Not about Harvard University professor Mikhail Kazachkov. Nor about the participant of the famous "Bulldozer exhibition" journalist Sergey Grigoryants.All of them in different years were in the Chistopol prison.
And the exhibits of the prison museum do not mention Anatoly Marchenko. And in the city itself, there is no hint that it was in Chistopol that Anatoly Marchenko held his last battle for the freedom of all political prisoners.
This is despite the fact that there are still political monuments in Chistopol. Up to the memorial cross to the victims of the Ottoman Armenian Genocide. And not far from the Chistopol prison, citizens installed a poklonny cross in memory of the last vicar of the Avraamiev-Gorodetsky monastery, Archimandrite Serapion (Mikhailov), who was tortured in the prison of the city of Chistopol on March 11, 1942 and buried in a mass grave. Opposite the poklonny cross there is a granite monument on which the words are carved:"To those who died innocently during the years of terror and lawlessness." There are also granite slabs on which the names of these victims are carved. I did not find the surname of Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko among these names.
