R.I.P. :

OBITUARY : Alexander Ginsburg(Daily Telegraph, 22/07/2002)

Alexander Ginsburg, who has died aged 65, was one of the architects of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.

A constant irritant to the KGB and its political masters, Ginsburg served three terms of imprisonment for his activities. From 1960 to 1962 he was incarcerated in a labour camp. He was again arrested in 1967, and sentenced to five years.

Then, in February 1977, the authorities finally lost patience, interrogating him for 17 months before he was tried and convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation", and sentenced to eight years. In the event, however, he and four fellow-dissidents were exchanged in New York for two Soviet citizens who had been jailed in America for spying. [...]

Alexander Ilyich Ginsburg was born in Moscow in 1936. He studied journalism at Moscow University from 1956 to 1960, and at the Moscow Historical Archive Institute from 1966 to 1967.

But his career as a dissident began in 1959, when he edited the first of three issues of samizdat (self-published) poetry for Sintaksis, the first "underground" magazine in Soviet Russia. He also participated in demonstrations, and in 1960 he was expelled from university and sentenced to two years in a labour camp.

In 1966 he published The White Book, a collection of material on the trial in 1965-66 of the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel (the English version appeared under the title On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky and Daniel). After his second term of imprisonment (1968-72) Ginsburg was forced to reside at Tarusa, 50 miles from Moscow and his family. Meanwhile, he had become a close friend of Solzhenitsyn, and worked as secretary to Andrei Sakharov.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2002 11:12 PM