Michail J. Makarenko survived World War II, a KGB prison, and almost 11 years in the Soviet gulag. Born Moishe Hershkovich into an Orthodox Jewish family in Galaz, Romania, on May 4, 1931, Makarenko ran away to the Soviet Union at the age of eight. At the start of World War II, he joined the Soviet Army, later being hospitalized four times for combat-related illnesses between 1941 and 1944. He moved to Leningrad after the war, where he took a number of menial jobs, but his efforts to toe the Party line chafed, and by the time he went to work in a concrete factory in the early 1960s, he was well on the way to becoming a dissident. He organized a strike there and was promptly fired. In 1965, he headed an underground art gallery, but when he tried to exhibit the work of Marc Chagall, he was banished from the city by the Central Committee. A year later, in Moscow, he was arrested, charged with anti-Soviet agitation, and sent to a KGB prison, Lefortovo. On and off, he spent nearly 11 years in the hellish work camps that made up what is known as the gulag. Following his release, he eventually immigrated to the United States, where he became an author and human rights activist.
On March 15, Michail was travelling with (his assistant and translator) Gregory (Burnside) from Hillsboro, Va., where they lived, to New York. At 12:45 a.m., they stopped at the James Fenimore Cooper rest stop along the New Jersey Turnpike. In the parking lot, he met a man named Brian K. White, a.k.a. DJ Coldblooded, who was peddling religious CDs. Michail refused to buy one. He died at age 75 after being bludgeoned with a rock the size of a brick.
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