Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was among the banned books that circulated in the Soviet Union thanks to clandestine copies like this miniature, which was printed in the West in 1973.

Vladimir Bukovskii, left, shown with Hoover fellow and historian Robert Conquest in 1987, spread the word that the Soviet Union was punishing political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals. He and a fellow inmate wrote a manual to help dissidents fight such imprisonment. A democracy activist in Russia today, Bukovskii tried in late 2007 to run for president, but election authorities refused to let him.

Oryol hospital, photographed in 1971, was among the special prisons for Soviet dissidents who were put away after being diagnosed as insane. Watchtowers and armed guards surrounded the hospitals, where inmates reported being beaten and abused.

Aircraft and rocket designer Aleksandr Bolonkin, photographed during his Siberian exile, spent fifteen years in camps and internal exile for reading and distributing works banned in the Soviet Union. He immigrated to the United States in the late 1980s as a political refugee and resumed his career as an aerospace scientist.

The Polish democratic reform movement Solidarity dedicated these protest stamps ““to Polish officers and soldiers murdered by the Red Army in the spring of 1940.”

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