LIKE Nadezhda Mandelstam,
Irina Ratushinskaya wrote her autobiography as a memoir to preserve herself and others, in her case, the lives of other women political prisoners in the gulag during the final crackdown by Andropov in the 1980s.
The Russian poet
Irina Ratushinskaya, writing about the labour camps in her memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope, stated: `If you allow hatred to take root ...
Appearing at "Blood and Letters," a conference in London organized by the women's theater company, The Spinx, in conjunction with the National Theatre's education department, she shared the platform with dissident Ukrainian poet
Irina Ratushinskaya and Amrit Wilson, a writer and activist on black women's and anti racist issues.
Then he swung hard, saying that he looked forward to the time "when a Mandelstam will no longer die in a camp, when a Pasternak will be able to go to Stockholm and collect his Nobel Prize, when a filmmaker such as Sergey Peredjanov will not be sentenced to five years of jail for being a homosexual, and when merely for marching in the wrong peace march and publishing in banned trade union publications the poetess
Irina Ratushinskaya will not be condemned to seven years of hard labor to be followed by five years of internal exile."
Also taking part will be Russian poet
Irina Ratushinskaya, who spent four years in Soviet concentration camps during the 1980s.