Aleksandr Ginzburg (1936–2002)

Aleksandr Ginzburg was a dissident poet, journalist, and human rights activist in the Soviet Union. He was sentenced to repeated terms in the labor camps (gulags) in the 1960s for his role as editor of the underground journal Sintaksis (Sytax). This was one of the first of the samizdat (self-published) journals of the post-Stalin period. In 1967, Ginzburg wrote The White Book, a report on the show trials of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, which he sent to the Communist Party Central Committee and smuggled to others outside Russia. His trial in 1968 in itself became a landmark in the Soviet human rights movement. Ginzburg was sentenced to five more years in the labor camps. In 1979, along with four other dissidents, he was expelled from the Soviet Union and sent to the USA in a prisoner exchange. Ginzburg moved with his family to Paris, where he worked as a columnist for an émigré magazine.