Farewell Natalia Gorbanevskaya, someone I came to know at the Prague Writers’ Festival. One of 8 to stare down Soviet tanks in Red Square, upon the invasion of the Czech Republic. She paid with forced psychiatric incarceration and injections.
Her work, poems and features here at PWF.
[excerpt from] ‘Spring Edits, Velvet Living: Atwood, Kral and Gorbanevskya’ ONE Magazine, Scotland
That evening, Natalia Gorbanevskaya had been given the Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression. Gorbanevskaya’s story made me sit up, and take note: on 25 August 1968, she and seven fellow Moscovites went to Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Gorbanevskaya and compatriots sat peacefully in Lobnoye Mesto with a Czech flag and signs which read “We Lost Our Best Friends”, “Hands Off the CSSR” and “For Your Freedom and Ours”. In turn they were accosted (more…)