Anatoly Marchenko
Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko (, 23 January 1938 – 8 December 1986) was a Soviet dissident, author, and human rights campaigner, who became one of the first two recipients (along with Nelson Mandela) of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament when it was awarded to him posthumously in 1988. Marchenko, originally an apolitical oil driller from a poor background, turned to writing and politics as a result of several episodes of incarceration starting in 1958, during which he began to associate with other dissidents. Marchenko gained international fame in 1969 through his book, My Testimony, an autobiographical account written after his arrival in Moscow in 1966 about his then-recent sentences in Soviet labour camps and prisons. After limited circulation inside the Soviet Union as samizdat, the book caused a sensation in the West after it revealed that the Soviet gulag system had continued after the death of Joseph Stalin. In 1968, in the run-up to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Marchenko wrote an open letter predicting the invasion. Arrested again, he was released in the early 1970s, but in 1974 he was interrogated and internally exiled to Irkutsk Oblast. In 1976, Marchenko became one of the