To Live Like Everyone

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"By opening Anatoly Marchenko's final book, the reader will sense the fate and soul of one of the few remarkable people of our time" wrote Andrei Sakharov. Anatoly Marchenko was a working class Soviet dissident, who died for his beliefs at the hands of the Soviet state. In this poignant memoir, Marchenko completes a remarkable series of autobiographical works which started with "My Testimony" and continued with "From Tarusa to Chuna". Born to a provincial railway worker's family in Siberia, Marchenko experienced a brutish upbringing. Driven by a passionate desire to expose the seamy underside of Soviet society, he became a human-rights activist, and began his epic battle with the Soviet authorities. This is his memoir of that battle. It provides a rare insight into a world inhabited by those who live "where the asphalt ends". An afterword by Lisa Bogoraz, Marclienko's wife, completes this document of a life spent in dissent. Anatoly Marchenko was the first dissident to expose the post-Stalin system of camps and prisons. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Chistopol prison in 1986, after spending 20 of his 48 years in the Soviet penal system.