Russian poet sentenced to seven years’ forced labour
Irina Ratushinskaya 1954-2017
On her 29th birthday, Irina Ratushinskaya was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour in a Soviet prison. Her crime was writing poetry, and being in jail didn’t stop her. Using burnt matchsticks, she’d scratch her poems on bars of soap, before memorising them. Then, when the chance arose, she’d scrawl them on cigarette papers and pass them to her husband, who smuggled them to the West. “The Soviet Union, as Russia was before it, is a land where poet is the proudest and the most dangerous of all professions,” wrote Professor Maria Carlson, in a New York Times review of one of Ratushinskaya’s poetry anthologies. Her themes, Carlson noted, were those that have tortured so many Russian poets – “memory, history, fate, love, poetry, faith and freedom” – and she wrote without rancour. “If you allow hatred to take root, it will flourish and spread,” she said, “and ultimately corrode and warp your soul.”
Born in Odessa, Irina was the daughter of an engineer and a teacher of literature. Her parents, who had Polish roots, brought her up an atheist – it was safer – but she developed a strong faith all the same. She began composing poetry at the age of five, but only rarely wrote them down. Once, a Soviet official came across one of her written works: he told her if she wanted state sanction, she should write a poem about the Communist Party, and Lenin. She declined. In 1971, having realised that humanities were a dead end, she went to university to study physics. After graduating, she became a teacher and married Igor Gerashchenko, a childhood friend. In 1980, both became involved in human rights protests; they lost their jobs and were briefly jailed. Though she described herself as apolitical, she was jailed again in 1982, for her writing; then, in 1983, she was convicted of anti-soviet agitation and propaganda and given the maximum term. In prison, she was held in the “small zone” for dangerous female prisoners; they survived by forming strong bonds of friendship and loyalty. In her memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope, Ratushinskaya describes enduring regular beatings, a diet that consisted of little more than bread and rotten fish broth, and sub-zero temperatures. “Hair starts falling out, your skin gets loose,” she wrote. “There are days and weeks when you can’t stand up because of hunger. I was quite close to death.”
Thanks to Igor’s efforts, her poems were published in the West, and her plight became a cause célèbre. In 1986, on the eve of the Reykjavík Summit, President Gorbachev announced her early release. Seriously ill, she came to England for treatment. She, her husband and twin sons lived both here and in the US – her Russian citizenship having been revoked. But she never felt settled, and in 1998 wrote to Boris Yeltsin, asking for permission to go home. “To be a Russian poet, I need to be together with my people,” she said, in 1999. She died of cancer earlier this month, aged 63.