Natalya

There are times when someone's passing just has to be acknowledged. This was one of those times. My partner called my attention to the New York Times obituary: “Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Soviet Dissident and Poet, Dies at 77.” I had seen the tag line, but hadn’t recognized the name until she said it on the phone. The words of a Joan Baez song came immediately to mind. I’d heard her sing “Natalia” many times, and I knew it was an homage to a woman who had defied the Soviets and was summarily committed to a mental institution. (You can hear it too if you click on “Natalia.”)

And now, thanks to the Times and a little Internet sleuthing, I know much more about Natalya. Her most notorious brush with the Soviet authorities involved her 1968 protest against the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the words of the Times, Natalya and a group of fellow dissidents “stood on a spot reserved for executions in prerevolutionary times and held up banners with slogans like ‘shame to the invaders.’” Not finished with her outrage, she wrote about the arrest and trial of her companions in an independent newspaper she had helped found, whose aim was explicitly to stand in opposition to the USSR’s “official” newspapers.

The following year, she helped found a group to promote civil rights in the Soviet Union. Her explanation: 

“One must begin by postulating that truth is needed for its own sake and no other reason.”

The simple statement speaks so clearly to so many issues: kindness, poverty, race, education, war, healthcare, love. So dangerously clearly.

Shortly after the protests, in 1969, Natalya’s writings challenging the Soviets got her arrested. She was  diagnosed with “continuous sluggish schizophrenia” and committed to a mental institution, where she remained until 1972. Two years after the demonstration in Red Square, she published a book about the protest and the subsequent trials, which was later published in English as Red Square at Noon. I haven’t read it, but I plan to. 

Finally, in 1975, she emigrated to Paris, where French psychiatrists pronounced her mentally healthy and concluded that she had been committed for political, not medical, reasons. No fooling. It reminds me of a speech that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave to the American Psychological Association in 1967 in which he urged the creation of an “International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment,” an organization dedicated  to the practice of defying common norms in the name of justice, of honoring “maladjustment” that speaks truth to power. Seen in this light, Natlya's story is both an inspiration for us and a cautionary tale about the many ways that people can be silenced.

In her introduction to the song written in Natalya’s honor, Joan Baez said, “It is because of people like Natalya Gorbanevskaya, I am convinced, that you and I are still alive and walking around on the face of the earth.”

That’s a large debt of gratitude we owe.