As a child Anatoli Radygin dreamt of an heroic life: to sail to the end of the earth, to be an Arctic pilot. But he earned his first reprimand for having made a “political error” in high school; he took the wrong ideological line in a paper on Maxim Gorki. Later he studied at the Soviet Naval Academy in Leningrad, the Soviet Annapolis, but was thrown out a few months before graduation for his “defiant attitudes.” Radygin was also a poet, and for a time he was a trusted person in Leningrad’s editorial offices. When Yuri Gagarin flew into space, it was Radygin who was chosen to write the first poem about this event. Later Radygin worked as a captain of fishing vessels. But whenever the moment came for his vessel to fish foreign waters, he would be removed as captain and someone else put in his place. He determined to escape by swimming the 23 kilometers from Batumi to Turkey. But he was betrayed, arrested by the KGB, and sentenced to ten years in prison, first at Potma, but later, as punishment for an attempted escape, he was sent to Vladimir, Russia’s most fearsome prison, where he spent six years. This article is adapted from a book of interviews, Profiles in Russian Resistance, by Irina Kirk, which Quadrangle will bring out later this month.
Q. Under what circumstances did your attempted escape occur?
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