Gabay, Ilya Yankelevich

In childhood, lost his parents. After their death, he lived with relatives, who for some time sent him to an orphanage ^[1] . ("How to talk about my relatives / Behind the times ago, fearlessly and simply? .. / Where is the usual orphan sick? / I felt the wisdom of their hearts." I. Gabay).

After serving in the army, he entered the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute , which he graduated in 1962.

After graduation, he worked as a teacher of Russian language and literature, first in schools on the periphery, then in Moscow. A ten year old boy began to write poetry ^[2]

Beginning of dissident activities

In 1965-1967 he took part in the process of the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement. He participated in the first human rights demonstration - the “publicity rally” on Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow on December 5, 1965 .

January 22, 1967 participated in a demonstration in defense of the arrested dissidents Yuri Galanskov , Vera Lashkova , Alexei Dobrovolsky and Pavel Radzievsky .

First arrest. Prison. Exemption

Arrested on January 26, 1967 for participating in a demonstration on January 22. Placed in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center. Gabay was charged under Article 190-3 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“organizing or actively participating in group actions that violate public order”). He was supposed to become a defendant at the trial on February 16, 1967, together with another arrested participant in the demonstration, Viktor Khaustov, but at the last moment it was announced that the case of Gabai was set aside in a separate proceeding, and Khaustov was tried alone. On May 26, 1967, Gabai was released from prison without a new charge; in August 1967, the criminal case against him was dismissed for lack of corpus delicti.

Continued Dissident Activities

In January 1968, he drafted and signed a number of human rights documents. Together with Julius Kim and Peter Yakir, he wrote an appeal “To the figures of science, culture, art” ^[3] , which spoke about political persecution and restalinization. In February, he signed a letter to the Presidium of the Consultative Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Budapest. ^[4] Dedicated to the convicts in the case of the “demonstration of seven” on Red Square the essay “At the closed doors of an open court” ^[5] . He worked on the issues of the human rights defenders periodical "Chronicle of Current Events" , created by Natalia Gorbanevskaya . I met with representatives of the Crimean Tatars movement (Zampira Asanova, Rolan Kadyev, Mustafa Dzhemilev ), helped them prepare documents (“Information”).

The KGB conducted several searches at Gabai’s apartment, and materials from the Crimean Tatar movement were seized. On April 15, at a meeting of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee , a decision was made on the proposal of the USSR Prosecutor's Office and the KGB to deprive Gabai and Marchenko of Soviet citizenship, but this decision was not implemented. ^[6]

Second arrest. Prison. Camp

Arrested in Moscow on May 19, 1969 . He is accused of disseminating slanderous fabrications defaming the Soviet system (Article 190-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR). He was taken by plane to Tashkent, where he was imprisoned.

In January 1970, by a decision of a Tashkent court, he was sentenced under article 190-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“the dissemination of knowingly false fabrications defaming the Soviet system”) ^[7] to 3 years in general regime criminal camps for participating in the Crimean Tatar movement. ^{[8] [9]} The leader of this movement, Mustafa Dzhemilev, was also convicted . In his last word, Gabai said: “Consciousness of my innocence, conviction of my rightness exclude for me the opportunity to ask for a mitigation of the sentence. I believe in the ultimate triumph of justice and common sense, and I am sure that the sentence will be overturned sooner or later ” ^[10] . In August he was sent under escort to the Kemerovo region. Arrived at the general regime camp, where he wrote the poem "Selected Places." Preserved his letters to friends written from the camp ^[11] .

On March 16, 1972, Gabai was taken from the camp to Moscow, where he was brought in as a witness in a criminal case against the publishers and distributors of the Chronicle of Current Events ). He was released on May 19, 1972 at the end of his sentence.

The last months of life and death

After his release, Gabai was in a difficult financial situation. I tried unsuccessfully to get a job, everywhere I got refusals. In August 1973, at the trial in the Yakir-Krasin case, Peter Yakir and Viktor Krasin testified against a number of their former associates in the dissident movement, including against Gabay, after which they publicly repented on television. Faced with such betrayal, Gabai fell into a severe depression. October 20, 1973 he committed suicide (jumped from the balcony of the eleventh floor). An obituary was published in the Chronicle of Current Events ^[12]

Died Ilya Yankelevich GABAI. He committed suicide on October 20, jumping from the balcony of his apartment on the eleventh floor. More than a hundred people gathered to say goodbye to him at the Nikolskoye crematorium in Moscow. The ashes of the deceased are buried in Baku, next to the grave of his father. He was a teacher and poet. He was 38 years old. After him there were a wife and two children. One can only speculate about the cause of this death. But such an explanation as GABAI does not fit into such explanations as a prison, interrogations, searches, forced inactivity of a talented person. According to the conviction of everyone who knew him, Ilya GABAI, with his high sensitivity to someone else's pain and merciless consciousness of his own responsibility, was the personification of the idea of ​​moral presence. And even his last, desperate act carries, probably, a message that his friends must understand ...

Although Gabay was not a believer, they served a suicide service in the Orthodox Church in Moscow, in the synagogue in Jerusalem, and also in the Muslim mosque. In January 1974, an urn with the ashes of Gabay was buried in Baku at the Jewish cemetery, a monument on the grave was created by the sculptor Vadim Sidur . ^[13]

  I'm flying!  And that means: get out of your skin!
 Get out of yourself!  From trifles.
 From old, similar to poems,
 And yet - supposedly poetry.

During his lifetime, Ilya Gabay was published only in samizdat ^[14] . In the 1990s, several collections of Gabay were published:

• "The Staff" ( M .: "Prometheus", 1990. - 78 p.)
• "Poems. Journalism. Letters. Memories ”(1990)
• “Selected Places” (1994)

Julius Kim wrote about one of Gabay’s works ^[15] :

Is this poetry or what? David Samoilov read, said: no, these are not poems. But from this it clearly follows that you lived near the righteous.

The widow of Ilya Gabay, Galina Gabay, with her son and daughter emigrated to the United States in 1974.

• Record of interrogations of Ilya Gabay's wife Galina Gabay in the case of her husband. Buknick