'' Requiem '' is an elegy by Anna Akhmatova about suffering of people under the Great Purge . It was written over three decades , between 1935 and 1961 . She carried it with her , redrafting , as she worked and lived in towns and cities across the Soviet Union . The set of poems was conspicuously absent from her collected works , given its explicit condemnation of the purges . The work in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963 , the whole work not published within the USSR until 1987 . It would become the best known poetry work about Soviet Great Terror
Great Terror
Great Purge
Requiem (Anna Akhmatova)