On August 5, 1968, Bogoraz was one of several to gather in Moscow’s Red Square to publicly protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She was exiled to Siberia for four years for her actions, but she not only inspired other dissidents, she celebrated that in her defiance she “lived like a free person,” she said after the Soviet Union fell. “I knew what I was doing was right.”
She was also one of the authors of an underground book documenting the terror-driven reign of Joseph Stalin, Memory, and even wrote a letter to the head of the KGB to say she was going to do so. She also contributed frequently to the dissident publication Chronicle of Current Events. “She was a moral influence since the beginning and her influence defined the course of this whole movement,” said Lyuda Alekseyeva, who heads the Moscow Helsinki Group. Bogoraz died April 6 after a series of strokes. She was 74.