To Live Like Everyone

"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.