Alexander Ginzburg
Alexander Ilyich Ginzburg | |
---|---|
Native name | Александр Ильич Гинзбург |
Born | Moscow |
November 21, 1936
Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Paris |
Nationality | Russian |
Citizenship | Soviet Union (1936–1991) → Russian Federation (1991–2002) |
Alma mater | Moscow State Historico-Archival Institute |
Occupation | human right activist, journalist |
Known for | human rights activism with participation in the Moscow Helsinki Group, cofounding Sintaksis and Phoenix |
Notable work | The White Book, The Trial of the Four |
Movement | dissident movement in the Soviet Union |
Spouse(s) | Arina Sergeevna Zholkovskaya-Ginzburg |
Children | two sons: Alexander and Alexey |
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Alexander (Alik) Ilyich Ginzburg (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ильи́ч Ги́нзбург; IPA: [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɪlʲˈjitɕ ˈɡʲinzbʊrk] ( listen); 21 November 1936, Moscow – 19 July 2002, Paris), was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident.
Biography
During the Soviet period, Ginzburg cofounded and edited the samizdat poetry almanac Sintaksis.[1] At the end of 1959, he issued the first samizdat literary magazine Phoenix, with Yuri Galanskov.[1]
Between 1961 and 1969 he was sentenced three times to labor camps. In 1979, Ginzburg was released and expelled to the United States, along with four other political prisoners (Eduard Kuznetsov, Mark Dymshits, Valentin Moroz, and Georgy Vins) and their families, as part of a prisoner exchange.
Dissident work
In 1965, Alexander Ginzburg documented the trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky (Sinyavsky–Daniel trial). Having obtained a copy of closed-door court proceedings from the court stenographer, he compiled a White Book documenting the trial. He then sent copies of the book with his address to the KGB and the Chief Prosecutor's Office.[2]:8 The book also circulated in samizdat and was smuggled to the West. Along with Yuri Galanskov, he was arrested and sentenced to prison in what was known as The Trial of the Four.
After his release in 1972, Ginzburg along with Alexander Solzhenitsyn initiated the Fund for the Aid of Political Prisoners. Based on the royalties derived from Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, it distributed funds and material support to political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union throughout the 1970-s and 1980-s.[3]
In 1976, Ginzburg became a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which monitored breaches of the human rights guarantees the Soviet government signed up to in the 1975 Helsinki accords. Ginzburg was given the task of monitoring the State's persecution of the smaller Christian denominations, for which he was, again, arrested in 1978 and sentenced to an eight-year prison term.[4] In April 1979, he was with four other dissidents deprived of his citizenship and exchanged for two Soviets who had been jailed for espionage.[3]
Throughout his career, Ginzburg advocated nonviolent resistance. He believed in exposing human rights abuses by the Soviet Union and pressuring the government to follow its own laws. He made an effort to smuggle his writings abroad in order to increase external pressure on the Soviets.
References
External links
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- Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found., a 2002 interview with Eduard Kuznetsov, Vladimir Bukovsky and Yuri Yarim-Agaev
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Bibliography
- The White Book
- The Trial of the Four
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- Articles with hCards
- Use dmy dates from March 2014
- Articles containing Russian-language text
- 1936 births
- 2002 deaths
- People from Moscow
- Russian journalists
- Russian poets
- Russian male poets
- Moscow Helsinki Group
- Soviet dissidents
- Soviet human rights activists
- Soviet expellees
- Soviet emigrants to the United States
- 20th-century poets
- Deaths in France
- Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
- Russian writer stubs