Natalya Gorbanevskaya

Natalya Gorbanevskaya was a poet and translator in Moscow whose verse could not be published officially and circulated in typescript. In April 1968 she began compiling the Chronicle of Current Events, a plain bulletin that listed arrests, trials, dismissals and the conditions of political prisoners across the Soviet Union, with no commentary and a request to readers to pass on facts. It ran, through a succession of editors who were arrested one after another, for fifteen years.

On 25 August 1968, four days after Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia, she went to Red Square with seven friends and her three-month-old son in a pram. At noon they sat down by the Lobnoye Mesto and unfurled banners, one of which read For your freedom and ours. Within minutes plainclothes officers beat them and dragged them away. Because she was nursing an infant she was not tried with the others, who were sent to camps and exile. She wrote a book about the demonstration, called Noon, and went on editing the Chronicle.

She was arrested in December 1969. Psychiatrists declared her to be suffering from sluggish schizophrenia, a diagnosis the state reserved for dissidents, and she spent more than two years in psychiatric hospitals, including a prison hospital in Kazan, where she was given drugs against her will. Joan Baez wrote a song about her.

Released in 1972, she emigrated to Paris in 1975 and worked for Russian émigré journals for the rest of her life. In 2013, aged 77, she returned to Red Square to mark the demonstration's 45th anniversary, and was briefly detained again. She died that December.