Ginzburg, Aleksandr Ilich

▪ 2003

      Russian journalist, dissident, and human rights advocate (b. Nov. 21, 1936, Moscow, U.S.S.R.—d. July 19, 2002, Paris, France), edited the literary journal Syntaksis (“Syntax”), often said to have been the first samizdat—a self-published underground work that circulated among opponents of the Soviet government. He was repeatedly arrested and jailed and became a symbol in the West of resistance to Soviet rule. As a boy he took his mother's name in protest against Joseph Stalin's persecution of Jews, and he was a skillful athlete and was interested in the theatre. A student in journalism at Moscow University from 1956 to 1960, Ginzburg published three issues of Syntaksis in 1959 before being arrested in 1960 and given a two-year prison sentence. In 1966 he issued a compilation of materials on the trial of two writers, published in English in the West as On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky and Daniel. He was arrested again in 1967 and given a five-year prison term. During this period he converted to Orthodox Christianity and became an advocate of the right of religious freedom. In 1974 Ginzburg became the administrator of a fund established by the exiled writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to assist the families of political prisoners. He also was active in the monitoring of Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords of 1975. He was arrested again in 1977 and sentenced the following year to an eight-year prison term. In 1979 he was stripped of his citizenship and, along with four other writers, sent to the U.S. in exchange for two Soviet spies. Ginzburg was distressed over banishment from his homeland and settled in France, where he worked on the Russian émigré journal Russkaya Mysl (“Russian Thought”). After the breakup of the Soviet Union, he remained critical of the new Russian government, and he became a French citizen in 1998.

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