Posted on 07/19/2002 3:57:59 PM PDT by HAL9000
PARIS, July 19 (AFP) - Renowned Soviet dissident Alexander Ginzburg died in his adopted city of Paris on Friday after years of ill health brought on by his time in forced labour camps. He was 65.One of the founders of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, Ginzburg had close ties with other major dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
He spent around nine years of his life in Soviet prisons and forced labour camps -- where, he once told a judge, he had truly been born.
"He was a talented journalist, the drama of whose life was that he lived at a time when freedom of speech was repressed," Sakharov's widow Yelena Bonner told AFP.
Natalya Solzhenitsyn, the writer's wife, said Ginzburg was "a pure, luminous man" who was "lively and courageous."
Ginzburg was born in Moscow in 1936 and trained as a journalist. He embarked on the road of dissidence in 1959 when he founded "Syntaxes," the Soviet Union's first truly independent magazine.
It contained work by underground writers and encouraged the growth of what became known as "samizdat", or self-published literature.
He was arrested after publishing three issues and sentenced to two years in a labour camp, but his example led the way for others to follow.
In 1967, he was arrested again, this time after writing and smuggling out to the West a "White Book" about the trials of the dissident writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky. He was sentenced to five years in a labour camp.
Upon his release he agreed to head a fund providing aid to political prisoners created by Solzhenitsyn, becoming one of the main sources of information in the West about the harassment of writers in the Soviet Union.
He defended not just the intellectual strand of Soviet non-conformism but also would-be Jewish emigrants (the "refuseniks"), Catholic Lithuanians and Crimean Tatars.
He remained on good terms with both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn despite their widely differing views.
He was arrested yet again after being a central figure in the Moscow Helsinki Group which fought for human rights.
Questioned by the judge at this trial, he announced that he was "born in the Gulag archipelago", a reference to Solzhenitsyn's classic work on the Soviet prison camp system.
His nationality, he replied to another question, was "zek" -- prisoner. He was sentenced to eight more years.
The dissident life was already taking its toll on his health, and he contracted tuberculosis.
Following an international campaign, Ginzburg was released along with four other dissidents -- in an exchange for two Soviet spies held in the United States -- and deported.
He went to the United States but settled soon afterwards in Paris, where he worked as a journalist for the emigre weekly La Pensee Russe.
He continued to lobby vigourously on behalf of the dissidents he left behind, travelling the world as an active print and broadcast journalist.
He retained his outsider's eye even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and opted to remain in France, where he obtained French citizenship in 1998.
He drew little encouragement from the election of Vladimir Putin as president in 2000, whom he called a former "low-level cop" employed to "spy on the families of Soviet troops."
Last December he expressed the view that a "normal, liberal society" was unlikely to come about in Russia for another 80 years.
Ginzburg was proud of his dissidence, which he described as "a means of being free in a society which is not."
The dissident movement, he told AFP, "succeeded in maintaining the idea that change does not have to be achieved at the cost of a bloodbath. We avoided a civil war at the end of the Soviet Union."
He is survived by his wife Arina and two sons.
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