Irina ratushinskaya to my unknown husbands

&#;Believe Me&#; was not one of the poems she first scratched onto a bar of soap in her prison cell. Many of the poems written by Irina Ratushinskaya, who died in Moscow last Wednesday, July 5, at the age of 63, found form that way.

Irina ratushinskaya to my unknown husbands

Knowing the power of her written words, the Soviet officials of Strict Regime Labor Camp No. 3 in Barashevo, Mordovia, deprived her of paper, but she memorized the poems she wrote on her soap bar and then washed away the evidence.

Later she wrote the memorized poems in tiny letters on cigarette papers.

In  People magazine reviewed Ratushinskaya&#;s prison memoir, Grey is the Color of Hope. The review recounted how the then-exiled-in-the-West poet had been arrested in at the age of 29 and sentenced to seven years&#; hard labor for &#;anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, possession of human rights documents, possession of articles about the Polish labor movement, and possession of anti-Soviet literature