Larissa Bogoras

Larissa Iossifowna Bogoras ( Russian Лариса Иосифовна Богораз (-Брухман) , full name: Larissa Iossifowna Bogoras-Bruchman, Bogoraz was the surname of her father and Bruchman of her mother; * 8. August 1929 in Kharkiv ( USSR , now Ukraine ); † 6 April 2004 in Moscow ) was a Soviet human rights activist and dissident . She became internationally known for her participation in the demonstration of the Seven on August 25, 1968 on Red Square against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Prague . Before that, in 1965, she had publicly defended her first husband , Juli Markowitsch Daniel and Andrei Donatowitsch Sinjawski, during their dissident trial.

life and work

Larissa Bogoras's parents were members of the CPSU and had fought on the side of the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war . During the Stalinist purges , her father, Josif Aronowitsch Bogoras (1896–1985), was arrested and sentenced in 1936 on charges of “ Trotskyist activity ”.

She herself studied language and literature at the University of Kharkiv . She completed her studies in 1950 and in July married Markowitsch Daniel , with whom she had a son. Until 1961 she worked as a teacher in Russian at various schools. After that, she began to work on her doctorate in Mathematical and Structural Linguistics at the Institute of Russian Language of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR . After separating from her husband, she lived in Novosibirsk in 1964/65 and taught linguistics at the State University there . Her doctorate , successfully completed in 1965, was revoked by government authorities in 1978. In 1990 this arbitrary administrative act was revised.

Larisa Bogoras was informed from the beginning about the dissident literature of her husband Julij Daniel, which he smuggled with the help of Andrej Sinjawskij into western countries, where in 1963 an anthology from it appeared for the first time under a pseudonym . Her husband was arrested in 1965 after visiting Novosibirsk. Together with Sinyavsky's wife, she publicly campaigned for their release. For the next two years she visited her husband regularly at the DubrawLag camp in Mordovia . She lived in Moscow again and her apartment became a meeting place and place for the exchange of information and whereabouts both for relatives on their way to visit camps and for former prisoners after their release. She herself had drawn the attention of many foreigners to discussions in Moscow that were critical of the regime during her visits to the camp. Larisa Bogoras was the first to succeed in bringing the political prisoners in the Soviet Union to the public's attention through her statements and letters. She was monitored by the KGB . In retrospect, the period is referred to as the founding time of the human rights movement in the USSR and Bogoras as a central actor.

Attracted worldwide attention her together with Pavel Litvinov authored appeal "To the world community" of 11 January 1968 in which it against the rights violations in the trial of Alexander Ginzburg protested. It was the first time that such a letter was not addressed to the communist party, authorities or the press, which had been brought into line, but directly to the public. It was subsequently broadcast several times by foreign radio stations, which made it known to many citizens of the Soviet Union for the first time that there was also an opposition in their state that campaigns for the defense of basic human rights. As a result, there were expressions of solidarity and the movement gained more members. In the following period, too, Bogoras signed many human rights texts.

On August 25, 1968, she took part in the demonstration of the Seven on Red Square in Moscow against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Prague, although many fellow activists advised against her being too public as a leading and well-known figure of the resistance present. As feared by them in advance, she was arrested and later sentenced to four years' exile in Siberia. There she was employed as a worker in a wood factory.

In 1972 she returned to Moscow and largely withdrew from the public work of the dissident movement. She was an active member again in the "Committee for the Defense of Tatiana Velikanowa " 1979/80. Occasionally she wrote appeals, alone or with other people, such as the one against the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn , which also called for the publication of the Gulag Archipelago and other materials to inform the public about the crimes during the Stalinist era . In a personal letter to Yury Andropov , she stated that she would start collecting historical information on the repression of Stalinism on her own, as she did not believe that the KGB would ever open its archives voluntarily. This initiative was one of the triggers for the publication of the collective work "Pamjat" in Samizdat between 1976 and 1984. Articles of her were rarely published in the foreign press. with her second husband Anatoly Martschenko she wrote under the pseudonym “M. Tarusjewitsch "in 1976 an article on international detente . In the early 1980s she urged the British government to behave more humanely towards the detained IRA prisoners. This sparked lively discussions.

She also turned to the Soviet government several times, demanding a comprehensive amnesty for all political prisoners. In 1986 she made a new attempt together with Cofija Kalistratowa , Michail Gefter and Alexander Podrabinjek , which was supported by other well-known Soviet artists and cultural workers . Thereupon the first political prisoners were released in January 1987 under the sign of glasnost and perestroika by Mikhail Gorbachev . Unfortunately, this came too late for Anatoly Martschenko, Larisa Borosja’s second husband. He died in December 1986 in Chistopol prison .

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union , Borosja continued to campaign publicly for human rights. In 1989 she became a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group , of which she was temporarily deputy chair. From 1993 to 1997 she was on the board of the Russian-American project group for human rights and between 1991 and 1996 she conducted seminars on human rights issues for non-governmental organizations .

Larisa Bogoras continued her public work even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She took part in the preparation of the "International Social Seminar" in 1987 and in autumn 1989 became a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. For a while she was its co-chair. From 1993 to 1997 she was a board member of the Russian-American project group for human rights. From 1991 to 1996 she conducted seminars on human rights issues for non-governmental organizations in the former Soviet Union.

Shortly before her death, she published an open letter in which she condemned both the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the 2003 Iraq war . She died on April 6, 2004 at the age of 74 after several strokes.

Her tomb is in the Khovanskoye cemetery .

Works

• Цветы на перелоге (повесть для детей, с Б. Харчуком и Я. Гарбузенко). М .: Молодая гвардия, 1960.
• Сны памяти. Харьков: Права людини, 2009.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Aleksandr Daniel: Larisa Bogoras is dead - a biography , Heinrich Böll Foundation, May 14, 2008; accessed on April 13, 2019
2. ↑ ^{a b} Manuela Putz: Sinjawski, Andrej and Juli Daniel , in: Kurt Groenewold , Alexander Ignor, Arnd Koch (eds.): Lexikon der Politischen Strafverarbeitung , Online, accessed on April 13, 2019
3. ↑ Jeremy Bransten. Russia: Soviet Dissident Larisa Bogoraz Dead At 74 . RADIO FREE EUROPE, April 7, 2004,
4. ↑ Larisa Bogoraz, 74 Early Soviet dissident. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 9, 2004