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 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. 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 founding members of the Moscow Helsinki Group. He was again arrested and imprisoned in 1981. Anatoly Marchenko died at age 48 in 1986 in Chistopol prison hospital, as a result of a three-month-long hunger strike, the goal of which was the release of all Soviet prisoners of conscience.
Source: ‘Anatoly Marchenko,’ Wikipedia
