One of the most significant Soviet dissidents, and for 20 years a thorn in the side of the authorities, Aleksandr Ginzburg was the founder of the samizdat poetry journal Syntaxis, the first independent magazine to appear in the Soviet Union. Featuring works by underground poets and writers, it first appeared in 1959 and lasted only three issues before Ginzburg was arrested while preparing a fourth, and imprisoned. The official charge was “forging a certificate in order to sit an examination on behalf of a friend”. But few doubted that his editorial subversion was the true reason for his detention.
After his release from an Arctic labour camp in 1962, Ginzburg continued to champion an independent press, publishing the White Book, a detailed account of the trial in 1965-66 of the writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky. It was the first detailed account to reach the West, and together with his subsequent five-year prison term, it helped to mobilise Western opinion against the brutality of the Soviet system. A Committee for the Support of Aleksandr Ginzburg was formed, and Amnesty International campaigned vociferously for his freedom.
Ginzburg was frequently arrested and imprisoned — often being held for long periods without trial — until in 1979, two years into a ten-year hard labour sentence, he was sent into exile in the West.
Aleksander Ilyich Ginzburg was born in Moscow. His Jewish mother was an economist by training, and as a young man he adopted her surname in protest at Stalin’s anti-Semitism. A promising poet, he studied journalism at Moscow University and was a promising young actor. After his arrest for publishing Syntaxis — a full half decade before Andrei Sakharov began to attract widespread publicity — he was expelled from the university. When he was released in 1962 he found work as a nightwatchman. He was briefly arrested again in 1964 for smuggling works by young Soviet writers out of the country.
In the White Book trial (when his coaccused were Aleksei Dobrovolsky, Yuri Galanskov and Vera Lashkova), Ginzburg was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda. It was further alleged that he was working in collaboration with the Narodny Trudovoi Soyuz (People’s Labour Alliance), an anti-Soviet Russian йmigrй organisation based in West Germany.
The court was packed with a hand-picked audience who howled and jeered at defence witnesses, while the judge refused to hear their evidence. Even Ginzburg’s lawyer, Boris Zolotukhin, was afterwards barred from working for 20 years. In January 1968, with much publicity in the West, Ginzburg was sentenced to five years in jail for anti-Soviet activities and slandering the Soviet State. He served his sentence at the Potma labour camp, 280 miles southeast of Moscow. At one stage he went on hunger strike to protest about conditions, and was force-fed by prison officials. His protest won him one concession: while in the labour camp he was permitted to marry his fiancйe, Irina Zholkovskaya.
Early in 1970 television viewers in the West were astonished to hear a recording of Ginzburg describing the horror of his living conditions. Somehow he had managed to give an interview, which had been smuggled out of Potama to William Cole of CBS News.
In it he discussed other labour camps, including the notorious Vladimir prison, 100 miles from Moscow, which he described as “a grave for the living”. As a result he was sent to experience the privations of Vladimir for himself. In 1972 he was released to live in internal exile in the town of Tarusa, 75 miles south of Moscow.
In March 1974, Ginzburg announced that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had appointed him to distribute part of the exiled writer’s earnings — largely from The Gulag Archipelago — to political prisoners and their families. Additional donations were invited, using Ginzburg’s address in Tarusa, and money came flooding in from within the country and from overseas. When the Soviet authorities intervened, Ginzburg saw that the funds reached friends and sympathisers instead.
During this period he became one of the main sources of information in the West about the harassment of writers in the Soviet Union, defending not just the intellectual strand of Soviet nonconformism, but also would-be Jewish emigrants (the “refuseniks”), Catholic Lithuanians and Crimean Tartars.
By 1976, growing ever bolder, Ginzburg began working with an underground group set up to monitor Russia’s response to human rights provisions reached at the European Security Conference in Helsinki in 1975. When several members of the group were rounded up in January 1977, Ginzburg took refuge in the flat of Andrei Sakharov, then the country’s leading dissident.
Nevertheless, the authorities caught up with him later that year as part of a general crackdown on opponents of the Soviet system. He was picked up on a Moscow street as he went to make a telephone call. When the US State Department attacked the Soviet authorities for detaining Ginzburg, Moscow was quick to issue a counter-rebuke, claiming that Ginzburg was an “agent for a pro-fascist йmigrй organisation”.
After 17 months in detention — personally sanctioned by President Leonid Brezhnev — Ginzburg was eventually put on trial. In the same week Anatoli Shcharansky, another leading Russian dissident and cause cйlиbre in the Soviet Union’s relations with America, appeared in court charged with being a CIA spy.
Ginzburg’s case was heard in Kaluga, 100 miles south of Moscow. Unusually, the Soviet authorities, while banning Western diplomats and journalists from the court, laid on twice-daily briefings. After an ouburst in which she denounced one of the witnesses as a liar, Ginzburg’s wife was also banned. Questioned by the judge, Ginzburg announced that he was “born in the Gulag archipelago”. His nationality, he replied to another question, was zek (prisoner).
On a sombre day for human rights campaigners, Ginzburg was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour. According to the judge, he could have been sentenced to ten, but consideration had been given to his two small children and his “cooperation in gathering evidence” against Shcharansky. As he was driven away from the court, friends and sympathisers threw flowers at his prison van and cried out his name.
In London the Conservative MP Rhodes Boyson, speaking in the House of Commons, called on Western nations to boycott the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. Many countries would eventually do so, but in protest at the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan not at its treatment of dissidents.
In a surprising move a few months later, the United States exchanged two convicted Russian spies for five Soviet dissidents, including Ginzburg. But while President Jimmy Carter was trumpeting his initiative, it soon became apparent that Ginzburg was unhappy with the deal. He had hoped to stay in Russia to fight the authorities there.
To the astonishment of many in a country that had espoused his freedom and rights, Ginzburg shook his sad head and accused his rescuers of gullibility. Wearing the baggy Bulgarian suit which the KGB had made him don in place of convict overalls, he declared to his welcoming press conference: “Of my own free will I would never have left the Soviet Union . . . It is clear that we have not found ourselves in an earthly paradise in America.” His release, he added, “had nothing to do with human rights”.
Nevertheless, he co-operated with the Western authorities. He appeared before a congressional committee and met the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, for talks in London. Finally, in February 1980, his mother, wife and two sons were able to join him, although they were unable to secure an exit visa for an adopted son.
Later that year the family moved to Paris. There Ginzburg contributed to the weekly journal of the exiled Russian dissident movement, Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought), and lobbied on behalf of the dissidents who remained in his home country.
Ever since his first release in 1962, Ginzburg had appealed repeatedly to the KGB for the return of his Syntaxis materials. Finally, in 1995 the Russian Federal Security Service allowed him to look at materials they had relating to his arrest in 1960 and gave him selected documents from his KGB files.
“It was for me a shocking moment,” he said. “They had saved almost everything.”
During one of his spells in the gulag Ginzburg converted from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity. Having been in ill-health for many years, as a result of his incarceration, Ginzburg had recently been suffering from cancer.
He is survived by his wife and by their two sons.
Aleksandr Ginzburg, Soviet dissident, was born in Moscow on November 21, 1936. He died in Paris on July 19, 2002, aged 65.