Anatolij Berger

was born in 1938 in Leningrad. The poet initially spent his childhood near Ufa due to wartime evacuations. In 1966 he wrote a cycle of poems entitled »Rossiya«, for which he was arrested in 1969 and sentenced to four years in a labour camp and two years’ exile. He was banned from publishing when he returned. He only began publishing again in journals in 1985, during Perestroika. In 1990 Berger’s name was cleared.