Irina Ratushinskaya, Last Of The Imprisoned Soviet Dissident Poets, Dead At 63

“[She] was among the last political prisoners of the Brezhnev era, and among the first to be released under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” (He freed her immediately before the 1986 Reykjavik summit.) “Her three years in [a labor] camp … nearly killed her, but resulted in an acclaimed memoir, Grey Is the Colour of Hope (1988), and more than 250 poems that bore witness to an undiminished optimism.”