July 13: Samizdat Pioneer

Soviet dissident Alexander Ginzburg was sentenced to eight years in prison on this date in 1978. He was active in the Russian Orthodox church but took on his mother’s Jewish family name as a young man to protest Soviet anti-Semitism under Stalin. Ginzburg was a poet and journalist who in 1959 created Syntax, a typewritten magazine considered one of the first samizdat (self-published) journals. After the third issue, he was expelled from Moscow University, arrested by the KGB, and imprisoned for two years. He was arrested again in 1967 and sentenced to five years in a labor camp, and again in 1978, sentenced to eight years. Ultimately, U.S. President Jimmy Carter arranged a prisoner exchange that obtained release and expulsion of Ginzburg and four other politicals. Throughout his career, he advocated non-violent resistance and sought to pressure the Soviet government to follow its own laws. A key source of information in the West about the harassment of writers in the Soviet Union, he also defended Jewish “refuseniks” (people persecuted for seeking to emigrate) as well as other victimized minorities. Weakened by his years of imprisonment, he died at age 65 in Paris in 2002.

“Most remarkably, he lived his life as though there were no surveillance, no searches, no arrests. He simply carried on as if the KGB didn’t exist.” —Eduard Kuznetsov