Natalya Gorbanevskaya - obituary

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the Russian journalist, translator and poet who has died aged 77, was one of the most visible women in the Soviet human rights movement and came to the notice of the West in 1968 when she led a demonstration in Moscow in protest at the crushing of the Prague Spring.

For several days after Red Army tanks rolled into Prague on August 21 1968 there were no outward signs in Moscow of unrest. Workers in Soviet factories were made to gather at meetings to show their “support” for the invasion. The first sign the Soviet authorities had that not all their citizens were prepared to endorse the invasion came on August 25 when eight protesters unfurled banners in Red Square. Leading the way was Natalya Gorbanevskaya, pushing her three-month-old son in a pram. At noon precisely she reached into the pram and pulled out a Czechoslovak flag and banners reading “For Your Freedom and Ours” and “Hands Off Czechoslovakia”.

The demonstration ended in a matter of minutes when plainclothes KGB agents closed in. “As they ran up to us they shouted, 'These are all dirty Jews!’ and 'Beat the anti-Soviets!’” she recalled. “We sat quietly and offered no resistance.” The KGB men tore the banners out of their hands and beat up the men in the group before bundling them into cars. As they drove off towards a police station, another convoy of cars sped out of the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate. Among the passengers was Alexander Dubcek, the deposed Czechoslovak leader who had been flown to Moscow in handcuffs on the night of the invasion.

^{Natalya Gorbanevskaya in Prague in 2008 (AFP)}

While her fellow protesters were charged and subsequently put on trial, Natalya Gorbanevskaya was released – apparently because she had young children. In the meantime she started compiling a report on the protest and trial (published in 1970 as Noon), and founded and printed several issues of a new samizdat publication, The Chronicle of Current Events. She and her colleagues, she proclaimed, were happy, “even briefly, to break through the sludge of unbridled lies and cowardly silence and thereby demonstrate that not all the citizens of our country are in agreement with the violence carried out in the name of the Soviet people”.

In December 1969, however, she was arrested again and sent to the Serbsky Institute, a psychiatric institution which became notorious in the 1960s for pioneering the concept of “slow-developing schizophrenia” — a diagnosis that complied with the KGB’s wishes to condemn mentally healthy dissidents to mental institutions. Signs of the disease included “stubbornness and inflexibility of convictions” and “reformist delusions”.

Diagnosed with “continuous sluggish schizophrenia,” on account of “irregularities in the scope of [her] thinking, as well as emotional and critical abilities typical for schizophrenia”, Natalya Gorbanevskaya was consigned to Butyrskaya Prison psychiatric hospital for more than two years. There she was subjected to treatment with psychotropic drugs, but she refused to be broken and on her release in 1972 she rejoined her friends in the dissident movement.

The significance of eight lone individuals on Red Square in 1968, unfurling crude banners of protest, cannot be overestimated. Their stand, albeit small and brief, provided a huge morale booster for reform-minded Soviets. Word of it spread around the capital and beyond within hours and, as Natalya Gorbanevskaya recalled: “In many Russian towns, people protested, writing slogans and posting leaflets at nights.”

In the West her cause was taken up by the American folk singer Joan Baez, who sang a song about her, which had been written by the team Shusha Guppy, Roy Apps and Gerald Moore. In the Soviet Union her fellow dissidents continued to publish The Chronicle Of Current Events after her arrest, and for the next 14 years its mimeographed pages challenged the hegemony of the official propaganda organs Pravda and Izvestia.

Natalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya was born in Moscow on May 26 1936. She was expelled from Moscow State University for political activism, but took a degree in Philology from Leningrad State University. She worked as a librarian, bibliographer and translator, developing a particular interest in Polish culture, translating essays and poets from Polish to Russian. Through Polish texts she gained an appreciation of Western culture and ideas, and in 2005 she would be granted Polish citizenship. Much of her focus was on her own spare but evocative poetry, little of which was published at the time.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s stand against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was her best-known public protest, but it was one of many and she continued to be harassed and threatened by the authorities. In 1975 she was given permission to leave the Soviet Union and moved to Paris, where she worked as an editor of the Kontinent migr dissident journal, as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe’s Russian service. In recent years she wrote an informative Russian language blog (ng68.livejournal.com). She also published dozens of collections of poetry and continued to translate literary works from Polish, Czech, Slovak and French into Russian.

In later life she turned her fire on the new post-Soviet Russian state. On receiving the Russian Prize (awarded by the Yeltsin Foundation to honour Russian writers living abroad) in 2011, she recited a poem she had written in 1965 to honour Yuri Galanskov, a fellow human rights activist who would later die in a Soviet labour camp. The poem evokes a place where “in the murky turbulence, / smiling broadly, / Russia stumbles / as into a mirror”. Her clear implication was that nothing much had changed in today’s Russia.

On August 25 last year Natalya Gorbanevskaya returned to Red Square with nine other demonstrators to mark the 45th anniversary of her famous protest. They were arrested on charges of holding an unlicensed rally.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya had two sons.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya, born May 26 1936, died November 29 2013