Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service.

I'm Louisa Dago and today I'm taking you back to October 1986 and the release from a Soviet

labor camp of the dissident poet Irina Ratush and Skaya.

Irina spent four years in the labor camp and her case was taken up around the world.

Her release was announced on the eve of an important summit on disarmament between the Soviet Union's new leader Michard. the Arena Ratuszenskaya has been telling me about those years.

Most of time I was sure I wouldn't survive.

First of all I was openly promised that I wouldn't survive if I wouldn't cooperate with the KGB.

Of course I was not allowed to write poetry. If I was caught, I would have another 10 years of imprisonment.

They searched my punishment cell almost every day, so I had to be very careful hiding and then smuggling out this

poetry to my husband and to my friends.

Arina says she always knew that one day she'd be arrested.

When she was 19 and a student in her native Odessa,

Arena had been approached by the KGB

to join a team of girls whose job it was to make friends

with foreigners and then inform on them to the KGB.

It was a sort of working as a prostitute, an informal.

And I was shocked, so I refused to cooperate very clearly.

And from that time, knew that sooner later the KGB would deal with me.

Arena studied physics but poetry was her first love.

She wrote in the privacy of her home, about love and creativity and her Christian faith,

and because she chose not to become an officially authorized writer, her There was official censorship, but there was also so-called Sammstad people made self-written copies of the poetry and

the literature they liked and spread around.

...