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World Service,13 Dec 2023,9 mins

Anna Akhmatova: The poet who defied a regime

Witness History

Available for over a year

The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova lived through some of the darkest chapters of Soviet history, but never stopped writing even though the communist regime repeatedly tried to silence her. One of Anna's most famous poems, Requiem, is about her son's arrest and the Stalinist terror. In 2022, art historian Era Korobova told Tatyana Movshevich about the poet's tumultuous relationship with her son. (Photo: Anna Akhmatova (second from right, at a Soviet writers' conference in 1965. Credit: Getty Images)

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