Dissident Town During The Soviet Era
During the Soviet period, Tarusa became the place where dissidents and people repressed by the Soviet authorities used to settle, since they were not allowed to live in Moscow, Leningrad and the capitals of all Soviet republics. Tarusa became the home place for such famous dissident figures as Anatoly Marchenko, Larisa Bogoraz, Ludmila Alexeeva, Malva Landa, Larisa Bogoraz, Gleb Yakunin, Pavel Litvinov, Sergey Khodorovich, Alexander Ginzburg, Anastasia Tsvetaeva, Ariadna Efron, Alexey Shemetov, Andrey Amalrik, Kronid Lubarsky, Vladimir Osipov, Vladimir Balakhonov, Sergey Kovalev, Alexander Ugrimov, Konstantin Babitzky, Tatyana Velikanova, Anatoly Futman, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Felix Svetov, Zoya Krakhmalnikova, Leonard Ternovsky, Lev Kopelev, Vladimir Maximov, Frida Vigdorova. Tarusa was the favourite place with Natalia Stolyarova - poet and writer, a long-time Gulag prisoner who later became Ilya Erenburg’s personal secretary and largely contributed to Erenburg becoming a de facto protest voice of Soviet intelligentsia. The book “Tarusa - 101st kilometer” by Tatyana Melnikova is devoted to the lives and fates of the famous dissidents living in Tarusa.
Quite symbolically, Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent his honeymoon in Tarusa before the war, and used to come to Tarusa after becoming a famous dissident writer and freedom-fighter.
Famous quotes containing the words dissident, town, soviet and/or era:
“The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“So they lived. They didn’t sleep together, but they had children.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, “They lived happily ever after” and the following quarter-century warning that they’ll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)