Irina Ratushinskaya died

On July 5, in Moscow, at the 64th year of her life, a writer died, the Soviet political prisoner Irina Ratushinskaya. This was reported in the Russian PEN Center.

Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa on March 4, 1954. She graduated from the Faculty of Physics of Odessa University. In 1979 she moved to her husband Igor Gerashchenko in Kyiv.

In 1982, Ratushinskaya was first published in the magazine "Grani" published in Frankfurt-Main. Her poems were published in emigrant newspapers. On September 17, 1982, Ratushinskaya was arrested. On March 3, 1983, the court sentenced her to seven years in prison and five years of reference under Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (anti -Soviet agitation and propaganda). The writer was charged with five poems, as well as storage of samizdat.

Ratushinskaya served a term in a female colony of strict regime for "especially dangerous state criminals" in Mordovia, which later wrote the autobiographical book "Gray - Color of Hope". During the conclusion, the Ratushinskaya was accepted in absentia to the International Pen Club.

Ratushinskaya case received wide publicity around the world. She was demanded to free Ronald Reagan, Margaret Tetcher, Francois Mitteran. On October 4, 1986, the Ratushinskaya was ahead of schedule from further serving the sentence. After liberation, she and her husband left the USSR.

In December 1986, at a press conference in London, Ratushinskaya and Gerashchenko announced that they did not intend to return to the USSR "until the Soviet authorities violate human rights." They called the Western countries to create an "international tribunal to provide pressure on the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist community in the field of human rights."

On May 14, 1987, Ratushinskaya and Gerashchenko were deprived of Soviet citizenship. Ratushinskaya taught at the University of Chicago. The citizenship of the USSR Ratushinskaya was returned on August 15, 1990. In the late 1990s, she was granted Russian citizenship without the preliminary refusal of British, which was required by law.

Since 1998, Ratushinskaya has been living in Moscow. She wrote the novels "Odessa", "Heirs of the Minnice Field", "Shadow of the portrait", several collections of poems. Ratushinskaya is the author of the scripts for the series "My Beautiful Nanny", "The Adventures of Mukhtar", "Taxist", "Airport".