He received the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 1987 and was released shortly thereafter, following 18 years of imprisonment in labor camps, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals. He was first arrested in 1966 on fabricated charges of theft. At the time, he was associated with youth protest movements advocating for the return of the Tatar people from Central Asia to Crimea, from where they had been deported by Stalin in 1944. His sentence was repeatedly extended on charges of anti-Soviet agitation as he continued to criticize the Soviet state through his writings.