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سیمای زنده بگوران

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کتاب سیمای زنده بگوران سرگذشت محکومین سیاسی زندان ها و اردوگاه های کار اجباری است در شوروی که گاه به شوند(دلیل)مخالفت با سیاست زمان به زندان میافتند و گاه بی هیچ دلیلی قربانی میشوند. جا دارد مبلغین حکومت جهانی رنجبران و مداحان جامعه ایده آلی "سوسیال کمونیسم" نیز این کتاب را بخوانند و از شرم بر خود بلرزند
My Testimony , Anatoly Marchenko

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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About the author

Anatoly Marchenko

6 books7 followers
Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko (also Anatoli Marchenko, Anatolii Marchenko, etc.) (January 23, 1938 – December 8, 1986) was an influential and well-known Soviet dissident, author, and human rights campaigner. He was the first recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament, awarded to him posthumously in 1988 (the only recipient to be honoured in this manner to date).

Initially a worker on a drilling gang, and not of intellectual background or upbringing, he became radicalized, and turned to writing and politics, after being imprisoned as a young man on trumped-up charges. During his time in the labour camps and prisons he studied, and began to associate with dissidents.

He first became widely known through his book My Testimony, an autobiographical account of his then-recent sentence in Soviet labour camps and prison, which caused a sensation when it was released in the West in 1969, after limited circulation inside the Soviet Union as samizdat. It brought home to readers around the world, including the USSR itself, that the Soviet gulag had not ended with Stalin.

He also became active in the Soviet human rights movement. He was one of the founder members of the influential and much-emulated Moscow Helsinki Group. He organized protests and appeals, and authored a number of open letters, several of which landed him in prison again.

He was continually harassed by the authorities, and was imprisoned for several different terms, spending about 20 years all told in prison and internal exile. Nathan Shcharansky said of him: "After the release of Yuri Feodorovich Orlov, he was definitely the number one Soviet prisoner of conscience."

He died in Chistopol prison hospital during his last incarceration, at the age of 48, as a result of a three month long hunger strike he was conducting, the goal of which was the release of all Soviet prisoners of conscience. The widespread international outcry over his death was a major factor in finally pushing then-General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to authorize the large-scale release of political prisoners in 1987.


More info: http://en.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/0...

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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Profile Image for Simon.
240 reviews3 followers
September 13, 2022
I would encourage anyone who has read gulag archipelago to read this

If Solzhenitsyns work deserves 5 stars for passion and intensity , this work deserves the same and an extra star for the extreme directness of the writing. The opening 100 pages are riveting.

In very plain language he tells us of his early freedom as a young man , his arrest ( he was involved with many others in a brawl ) solitary confinement, sentencing to one year , then his attempt to escape the country , his capture and conviction to 6 years , then the committal to the camps. The journey by train the temporary prisons and then finally camp life

The writing is far more coherent and accessible than Solzhenitsyn who tends to rant and ramble ( he was writing without being able to hold all his manuscript in one place )

It is another tale of the miseries of communism and the Soviet Union : I wonder if these camps remain under Putin ?
Profile Image for Rouzbeh Gh.
6 reviews
June 14, 2019
کتابی فوق العاده تاثیر گذار و زیبا و در عین حال ناراحت کننده که در بعضی مواقع انسان حتی جرات اینکه خود را جای شخصیت داستان هم بگذارد،نمیکند!!!چیزی که بیشتر از همه انسان رو تحت تاثیر قرار میده اینه که نویسنده بلافاصله بعد از آزادی از زندان های وحشتناک شوروی شروع به نوشتن این کتاب کرده و پس از اتمام این کتاب دوباره به زندان می افته!!!
Profile Image for Fionnuala.
646 reviews51 followers
December 5, 2021
I've got to the point in my gulag research where the textbooks are not going over anything I don't already know; now I'm looking for personal accounts that really get into the details. To get a decent idea of a subject, I find that the more testimonies you read, the broader your understanding will become -- a lot can be lost in an academic examination of things. What's needed is something unflinching and personal, and that's precisely what Marchenko's book is.

Marchenko admits that he did not write this book because he particularly wanted to, or because he felt the need to unburden himself of the horrors he lived though. He wrote this book because he felt that it was his duty to expose what was going on; he felt that if he survived to witness these atrocities, he was obligated to write them down. He included nothing in his book that he didn't live through himself or directly witness; there are no second-hand stories here. Despite his intention being one of duty rather than autobiography, Marchenko's writing is deeply personal and deeply moving. The facts are solid, the images vivid, and the work is profoundly touching.

This is another one of those most essential books, freezing more stories from the labour camps and preserving them like an insect in amber. We will never hear all of the stories of the men and women who laboured and died without names, in some of the most brutal conditions in humanity's history; such a thing is, unfortunately, impossible. But the more stories we can hear, and the more of their names we do know (or, as is so often the case, if names are unknown we can learn appearances, habits, places of origin; any personal detail to represent this stolen life is better than nothing), the more we can do to remember all of these victims as a whole. Many stories were never written down, because the person did not survive or, if they did, they were not in a position to record it. We owe a lot to writers like Marchenko, who resisted the urge to look away and try to move on; who witnessed, and then told us what they saw.

Marchenko suffered greatly for his efforts, but never once did he stop speaking out. He was persecuted terribly for his honestly, and eventually died in a camp hospital while on hunger strike protesting Soviet prisoners of conscience. He was only 48 years old. Reading this book, learning of the horror and anguish he suffered, and knowing that he would go on to die in a camp was terrible, but served to underline Marchenko's unshakeable morals. Here is a man who witnessed injustice so extreme that he would quite literally rather die than be even remotely complicit in it; this book illustrates, in incredible detail, just how he arrived at that point.
Profile Image for Rowan.
104 reviews
November 21, 2021
A very informative book, with a lot of information about the camps and prison in the 1960s. Since I started looking into the Gulag, I've been looking for something with this level of detail. Marchenko's descriptions are vivid and in-depth, with plenty of detail. This book strikes a wonderful balance of being informative and easy to digest. This book is not about Marchenko's experience in the camps, but about the camps themselves, as told based upon what Marchenko observed personally, first-hand. Nonetheless, there was never a point where I felt that anything described was impersonal. The quality of the information and description did not sacrifice strength of personality while reading it. You can really tell that this was written by someone with the specific purpose of wanting people to know just how bad conditions really were.
Profile Image for Sam.
157 reviews1 follower
September 8, 2023
Книга по-страшному концентрированного абсурда и бесчеловечности. И все это не просто на межличностном уровне, а в виде такой системной мерзости. И даже наказать некого, по сути. Даже если представить, что хотя бы треть из этих воспоминаний правдива (имею в виду не фантазию автора, а физическую возможность человека запомнить столько деталей своих 6 лет жизни). Как по мне, вот самый яркий пример того абсурда:

"[...] если жена - член партии, то свидетельства, что она не больна венерической болезнью, не требовалось, вместо него она могла предъявить партбилет."

Постарался выбрать что-то смешное, потому что от остальных нелепостей и человеческой жестокости очень хочется кричать: громко, долго, возможно в пустоту. Хотя, в отличие от рассказов Шаламова (художественное преукрашивание?), Марченко более оптимистично видит человека в таких непростых условиях.
Profile Image for Andrey Pozdnyakov.
9 reviews
August 23, 2025
Тяжёлая книга о зоне, но написано хорошо, читается легко и с интересом. Подробно о многих бытовых вещах на зоне. Заставляет задуматься о прошлом России, а также о сегодняшнем положении в зонах, особенно политических. Включается фантазия на тему «что бы делал я в такой ситуации?» Не знаю, но думаю, что не сломался бы. Упоминается Юлий Даниель, может, стоит его тоже почитать.
Profile Image for Anastasiya Kudzelia.
2 reviews
September 27, 2022
Одна из самых тяжёлых прочитанных книг. Тут собраны истории разных людей, политзаключённых и уголовников, которых ломала система ГУЛАГа. Это отражение истории СССР, жестокости, дикости, бессердечия и необразованности.
Profile Image for Tomasz.
936 reviews38 followers
September 10, 2023
Przejmujący, niepodrabialnie autentyczny obraz łagrów sprzed sześćdziesięciu lat, pokazujący, że śmierć Stalina zmieniła nie tak znowu dużo, i wcale nie zawsze na lepsze. W bardzo dobrym przekładzie.
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