In memory of Sir Tom Stoppard, a visionary dramatist and fierce champion of free expression

29 Nov 2025 | News and features

Tom Stoppard’s path to literary success is a story that would be worthy of the stage. Born in Czechoslovakia (as it was then known) as Tomás Straüssler in 1937, he endured a turbulent childhood before rising to fame as one of the great playwrights of his time. Known for his intelligent wordplay and intellectual prowess, Stoppard’s career spanned more than 60 years, across stage, screen and radio.

As well as being a literary great, he was also a staunch advocate for free speech. Although he often suggested that his works were not politically motivated, much of his writing centred around themes of censorship and human rights.

Stoppard joined the advisory board of Index on Censorship in 1978 and made several contributions to the magazine in defence of free speech, declaring in one interview that “free expression was what made all the other freedoms possible, so it was everything.”

Stoppard first rose to fame in 1967 with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a tragicomedy revolving around the actions of two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which brought overnight success after its London debut at the Old Vic. The play was responsible for the first of his five Tony award wins for Best Play, a record unmatched by any other playwright. Other works to earn this accolade include his 1974 comedy Travesties, 1982 drama The Real Thing and his 2002 drama The Coast of Utopia.

The 1990s signalled a decade of unparalleled success for Stoppard. His services to literature were acknowledged with a knighthood in 1997, and he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his 1998 film Shakespeare in Love.

Age proved no barrier to the writer, who continued his work well into his 80s with his last play Leopoldstadt, a drama centred around a Jewish family in Vienna, which earned him his final Tony award for Best Play in 2023.

His achievements are perhaps even more impressive considering the challenges he faced in early life. Soon after he was born, his family, who were non-practising Jews, were forced to flee Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. After four years in Singapore, Stoppard once again found himself fleeing conflict. An invasion by Japan caused him to move to India with his mother and brother, while his father stayed behind and was killed at sea by a bomb dropped by Japanese forces. In 1946, Stoppard’s mother married a British army major who gave the family his name and moved them over to England.

These roots influenced his later role as an advocate for free speech. The authoritarian regime that engulfed his homeland of Czechoslovakia in the years between the Soviet Union invasion in 1968 until the fall of communism there in 1989 helped to shape his opposition to totalitarianism and media repression. After reading about Victor Fainberg’s experience of being detained in the USSR in an issue of Index on Censorship in 1975, Stoppard was inspired to write Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a drama set in a Soviet mental hospital. He dedicated the play to Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, another incarcerated dissident, and an excerpt was published in the magazine in 1978.

Stoppard worked as a journalist prior to his transition to the world of theatre. His early career influenced some of his later causes. For example, he voiced his support for Hacked Off’s campaign for a free and accountable press due to his belief that “free expression in the context of British journalism seemed to me to be about as important a subject for any kind of writing, including plays, as you would find.”

In his final interview with Index in 2021, he warned against the modern culture of intolerance, identity politics and cancel culture, declaring that “the danger to society of actual censorship has probably never been greater”. A year later he wrote playfully but seriously on identity politics.

Such talents as Stoppard come few and far between, and his contributions to both literature and the fight for free speech will be sorely missed.

In memory of Viktor Fainberg, 1968 Red Square demonstrator

4 Jan 2023 | Czech Republic, News and features, Russia, Slovakia

The prominent Soviet-era Russian dissident Viktor Fainberg died this week at the age of 91. Fainberg, who was a philologist, was one of the eight people who protested in Red Square, Moscow on 25 August 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, alongside Pavel Litvinov and the late poet Natalya Gorbanyevskaya, among others. Despite the protest lasting only five minutes, all were arrested by the Soviet authorities.

All these people were instrumental in the founding of Index, as Jo-Ann Mort’s interview with Pavel Litvinov, published here, shows.

On Fainberg specifically, after his arrest he was brutally assaulted by the police to the point where he could not physically stand trial. Fainberg was examined, then sent to a Leningrad psychiatric hospital for over four years with no evidence of mental illness – details of which he shared with the translator Richard McKane who he met at an Index on Censorship party in the 1970s. He was then diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was a common tactic during the Khrushchev era to repress dissenters and silence voices of criticism in the Soviet Union, which continued into the Brezhnev era.

In the spring of 1971, Fainberg staged an 81-day hunger strike against conditions in the psychiatric hospital, and was eventually released in February 1973.

Fainberg founded the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse in April 1975, an organisation which campaigned against the abuse of human rights through misuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. The country withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983.

After his release, Fainberg, born into a Jewish family in Kharkiv, Ukraine on 26 November 1931, initially moved to Israel before settling in France in later life.

Index patron Tom Stoppard’s play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was jointly dedicated to Fainberg, and Stoppard himself joined Index’s advisory board in 1978 after writing about Fainberg’s incarceration.

In 2014, Fainberg received the Medal of the President of the Slovak Republic for his actions in 1968, and in 2018 received the Gratias Agit award from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs for promoting the good name of the Czech Republic.

He kept up his activism to the end, shifting his focus to Ukraine. Years before the recent invasion, Fainberg spoke out against the Kremlin’s Ukrainian political prisoners. He also warned of the “shadow of Munich hanging over Europe”.

In his 2015 letter to abducted Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who was on hunger strike in a Russian prison, he wrote “I was born in Ukraine, in Kharkiv.  The first nature that I saw, the first songs that I heard, were the nature and the songs of Mother Ukraine”. At the end of the letter, Fainberg told Savchenko that he was joining her hunger strike (which she later agreed to end). Fainberg also attended many protests in Paris, demanding the release of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov.

On news of his death Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessmen who was himself jailed for falling foul of the Putin regime, said:

“He was an amazing, remarkable man who felt other people’s pain as if it were his own. The world is a different place without him – even less human, even colder.”

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