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)
“As for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One difference between Nazi and Soviet camps was that in the latter dying was a slower process.”
—Terrence Des Pres (1939–1987)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)