Boris Mirkin, 1937–2019. Photo courtesy of Iofe Foundation

Boris Savelyevich Mirkin, poet, political prisoner, board member of the St. Petersburg Memorial Society, and our comrade, died on April 1, 2019.

Boris Savelyevich was born in Leningrad in 1937. During the Siege, he was evacuated from the city. He graduated from the Leningrad Chemical and Pharmaceutical Institute in 1964 and went to work at Research Laboratory No. 1 of the Military Medical Academy. After Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, Boris Savelyevich wrote poems condemning the invasion. He was arrested in 1981 and charged with violating Article 70 Part 1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code [“anti-Soviet agitation”]. The Leningrad City Court convicted him, sentencing him to three years and six months of forced labor. He served his time in the camps of Perm Region. After his release, Boris Savelyevich worked as a lathe operator at the Krasny Vyborzhets factory in Leningrad, a trade he had picked up in the camps. In 2004, he wrote and published a book of memoirs and poems entitled I Face the Music (Derzhu otvet...).

The book included this poem, which he wrote in a labor camp in Perm Region in 1982.

Since childhood I hated lies.
They sickened my soul.
Truth alone is light and power,
Piercing the heart like a knife.
Those who lied from podiums
And pulpits, who regaled
The baron’s hollow tales
As truth, I found odious.

Who sent us far not knowing why,
Who knew only head-on attacks,
So no one got off with a scratch,
Who marched us to heaven not knowing the way.

Alas, to this day the liars thrive,
Ignoring the truth for falsehoods.
Oh, the world is filled with mugs,
The smug faces of those who worship lies.

People are invited to pay their last respects to Boris Savelyevich Mirkin from ten to eleven in the morning on April 5 at the morgue of the Elizabeth Hospital, 14 Academician Baykov Street.

Source: Iofe Foundation Newsletter, April 4, 2019. Translated by the Russian Reader