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)
“If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They were right. The Soviet régime is not the embodiment of evil as you think in the West. They have laws and I broke them. I hate tea and they love tea. Who is wrong?”
—Alexander Zinoviev (b. 1922)
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)