Irina Ratushinskaya
Soviet dissident who survived a labour camp and was hailed as the finest Russian poet since Pasternak
IRINA RATUSHINSKAYA, who has died of cancer aged 63, was a Russian novelist and poet who spent three years in a labour camp for the crime of “antisoviet agitation and propaganda”; after an international campaign was mounted, in 1986 the new Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev ordered her release.
Acclaimed by some as the greatest Russian poet since Pasternak, Irina Ratushinskaya had begun writing poetry in her teens. Her poems, often on religious or philosophical themes, were published in samizdat publications and in Russian journals abroad, networks which existed independently from Soviet censorship and were therefore illegal.
In December 1981 she was sentenced to 10 days’ detention for her part in a human rights demonstration in Moscow on behalf of the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. Two years later she was sentenced to seven years in a strictregime labour camp, followed by five years’ internal exile, for illegally circulating poetry critical of Soviet history and writing an article which expressed the view that Russia was suppressing Solidarity in Poland.
Her prison experiences, which she described in Grey is the Colour of Hope (1988), were dreadful by any standards. The food was often inedible; she endured regular beatings and spent at least 138 days in freezing punishment cells. In August 1983 she went on hunger strike in protest at the refusal of the prison authorities to allow her husband to visit her.
A month later she was force-fed. In winter, when temperatures fell to minus 40C, the thin camp uniform was completely inadequate. Her health deteriorated and she developed serious illnesses. “Hair starts falling out, your skin gets loose,” she recalled. “There are days and weeks when you can’t stand up because of hunger. I was quite close to death.”
Yet she still managed to write poems on bars of soap with matchsticks, washing them away when she had committed them to memory, then writing some of them on cigarette papers that she smuggled out to her husband Igor Geraschenko, who relayed them to the world.
Her plight became known in the West and groups for her defence were established in Britain and the United States. In 1986 a reading of her poetry was held outside the Soviet Embassy in London, to coincide with the publication of a collection of her poems, No I’m Not Afraid.
A British priest staged a demonstration on her behalf, living in a mock cell in the nave of a Birmingham church and eating the Soviet camp diet of bread and water. She was released in October 1986 on the eve of the Reykjavik summit between Gorbachev and US president Ronald Reagan.
She had lost 42lb in weight and soon afterwards she and her husband came to Britain on a three-month visa so that she could receive urgent medical treatment. In their absence the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree revoking their citizenship.
For 12 years the pair remained in Britain, wrote, campaigned for human rights, lobbied for Russian writers and had twin sons. But they never became westernised, and in 1998 Irina Ratushinskaya wrote to the Russian president Boris Yeltsin, asking for permission to return home. The couple were deemed “rehabilitated” and their citizenships were restored.
“I feel that as a writer I must be here, otherwise I will cease to be a Russian writer,” she told an interviewer in 1999. “I would stop understanding what is going on … To be a Russian poet, I need to be together with my people.”
Irina Borisovna Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa on March 4 1954, to a Polish family who had worked hard to become presentable Russians. Her mother was a teacher, her father an engineer.
To ensure their daughter remained eligible for a professional career, they brought her up as an atheist and forbade her grandparents to teach her Polish or to talk about “un-soviet” subjects. But she believed in God from an early age and began to take a particular interest in the hidden life and faith of her Catholic grandparents.
In 1971, she was admitted to study physics and mathematics at the University of Odessa. Her first job was as a schoolteacher and she was quickly promoted to assistant lecturer at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute. Trouble followed when she was offered promotion to a job that would have involved her discriminating against Jews. She refused and lost her job.
In 1979 Ratuschinskaya married the human rights activist Igor Geraschchenko and moved with him to Kiev. Refused permission to emigrate, the couple became increasingly involved in human rights issues.
It was her refusal to beg for a pardon that brought her into such conflict with her labour camp jailers. As a result she found herself incarcerated with nine other women in the “Small Zone”, a restricted area set aside for “dangerous” female political criminals.
It was the bonds of friendship which she formed with this group that helped her to get through her ordeal. “We risked our lives together,” she recalled. “I had no idea exactly when communism would collapse but I thought if our female team of 10 people could get through this, unbroken, without any cooperation with the KGB, without any compromises, as free people, it would be proved that women could do it.”
The group worked out rules for communal survival. “If one of us was sent to the punishment cell all the rest started a hunger strike till she was safely back with us. The idea was that they can kill one of us but then we would not have stopped our hunger strike; so instead of one dead body there would have been 10 and if you kill so many political prisoners you will have a scandal all around the world.
“If you are trying to charm the world with your lovely communism this wouldn’t fit. And it worked. Ten of us survived and no one asked to be pardoned and we didn’t talk to the KGB.”
On the day she was released the prison governor effectively conceded the effect of international pressure when he pointed out sackfuls of letters, addressed to her, from all over the world. Not a single one had been handed over to her, but nor had any been opened. “We weren’t interested in what they had to say,” he told her, “but we knew we’d have to let you go when the sacks started to weigh too much.”
Irina Ratushinskaya’s other books included The Odessans (1997), a dense historical novel charting the lives of three families during the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, and Fictions and Lies (1999), a taut psychological thriller based around of the lives of Soviet writers living at a time when the psychiatric hospital and the labour camp were the favoured instruments of repression.
After returning to Moscow she continued to write and gave occasional poetry readings. Despite the uncertainties of life in Russia, she remained irrepressibly optimistic: “In a way, it’s lucky to have a turbulent life. When everything is too easy, sometimes people lose their love of life, they lose enthusiasm. I don’t know what will happen in the future; there are no guarantees. But, so far so good.”
She is survived by her husband and sons.
Irina Ratushinskaya, born March 4 1954, died July 5 2017