RUSSIAN dissident and writer Natalia Gorbanevska will be awarded in memoriam Slovakia’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Double-Cross of the second class, for her lifelong efforts in the area of human rights and democracy.
Gorbanevska will receive the honour based on the request of Bratislava’s Deputy Mayor Ján Budaj, who delivered it to former president Ivan Gašparovič after her death on November 29, 2013, the SITA newswire reported.
Gorbanevska was part of a small group of dissidents who protested in Moscow’s Red Square on August 25, 1968, against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops. In 1969 she was placed in a psychiatric facility in the USSR as punishment for her views, where she lived for three years isolated from the rest of the world.
After leaving the facility in 1972, Gorbanevska rejoined the dissident movement, but in 1975 she was forced to emigrate from the USSR. She settled in Paris, where she died last year.
Source: SITA
Compiled by Michaela Terenzani from press reports.
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information
presented in its Flash News postings.
