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Obituary: Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz
By Marjorie Farquharson, The Independent
London, United Kingdom; Saturday, Apr 10, 2004
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"THE GLORY of Soviet science is talked of loudly and at length and each of
you feels you share some part of it," Larisa Bogoraz wrote to Soviet
scientists in 1975, appealing for them to help the imprisoned biologist
Sergei Kovalyov:
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Let us remember the shame of Soviet science too: the lines of scientific
enquiry forbidden, the scholars forced out . . . Surely you can sense that
when you make a choice between the fate of Sergei Kovalyov and research on
the nucleus of cells - and favour the latter - you are not championing
science, just your own place in it?
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Larisa Bogoraz and Anatoly Marchenko
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That sense of moral choice was always very vivid for Bogoraz and put a full
stop to her own career as a philologist at the USSR Academy of Sciences. She
was sacked, stripped of her Masters Degree in 1978 and later, in the 1980s,
was even moved from her job as night watch at an institute on the
instructions of the KGB.
Larisa Bogoraz's sacking came after she and six others had stepped out on to
Red Square at midday one Sunday in 1968 and unrolled banners protesting
against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Violently broken up in three
minutes, this bold display was the first public demonstration of its kind in
the Soviet Union and recognised as the start of the human- rights movement
that continues today.
At her trial in October 1968 Bogoraz said she would have preferred to have
stayed at home and add her nameless voice to the protests of the great and
famous - "but there were none". The court sentenced her to four years of
internal exile in eastern Siberia.
In her writings and in her behaviour, Larisa gave the impression of being a
free spirit, in a country that at that time decidedly was not. When she and
Pavel Litvinov, for example, protested against the imprisonment of the
writers Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg in 1968 as an assault on
freedom of expression and violation of Soviet law, they addressed "World
Public Opinion".
As this was one of the first appeals to international public opinion ever
to have emerged from the Soviet Union, the boldness of the address
gripped the foreign media.
Protests that Bogoraz put her name to would usually end with calls for
people in other countries to set up their own national support committees.
And they found a response. Around 50,000 people in West Berlin and the
Federal Republic of Germany associated themselves with the 1974 "Moscow
Appeal" against the deportation of the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Sixteen 16 British intellectuals - who included W.H. Auden, Julian Huxley,
Bertrand Russell and Stephen Spender - responded to the appeal to "World
Public Opinion", after it appeared in The Times on 13 January 1968. The
Writers and Scholars Trust was set up as a result and Index on Censorship
began charting the state of freedom of expression the world over.
On paper Larisa Bogoraz's life looks relentlessly bleak. Ill-health dogged
her for decades; both men she married were also political prisoners - her
second husband, Anatoly Marchenko, six times. It was his death on hunger
strike in a labour camp in 1986, and the outcry it provoked, that finally
triggered the large-scale release of political prisoners by President
Mikhail Gorbachev.
Bogoraz's wit, however, and what friends called her "intellectual and
physical charm", made her manner anything but tragic. She was frail, but she
was also tough.
One of the slogans at her Red Square demonstration had been "For Your
Freedom and Ours", and by the end of her life she had the satisfaction of
seeing several of the things she believed in become reality, against the
odds. Hunger is no longer approved as a way of punishing prisoners in Russia
now, and international human-rights standards have been written into the
Constitution, for human-rights activists to achieve with them what they may.
The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn's chronicle of political
imprisonment under Stalin - has also been published in Moscow. But the
crimes of the Soviet secret police have never been judged by an
international tribunal, as Bogoraz wanted; let alone by national courts.
Jewish and born in Ukraine, Larisa Bogoraz moved easily between different
interest groups campaigning for human rights, but once wrote that she
identified culturally with Russia. She joined the Moscow Helsinki Group in
1989 and piloted their Seminar on Human Rights in Russia's regions until she
retired in 1996.
In recent years she was critical of the conduct of the war in Chechnya, and
opposed the notion of "pre-emptive war" that the United States and its
allies declared on Iraq.
Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz, philologist and human-rights campaigner: born
Kharkov, Soviet Union 8 August 1929; married 1950 Yuli Daniel (died 1988;
one son; marriage dissolved), 1972 Anatoli Marchenko (died 1986; one son);
died Moscow 6 April 2004.
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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