Alexander Ginzburg, who died on July 19th, aged 65, is a nostalgic figure of modern times, part of the western myth of the Russia of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, when literature, the word, played a crucial part in political change. Crushed between two evils - authoritarian government and the faceless mob called "the people" - the Russian intelligentsia always had a unique role as a mediator, educator and preacher, with literature as its only tool to influence the people in a country lacking public opinion,
None the less, Alexander Ginzburg's sacrifices were real enough: he was jailed three times, spending nine years in prison and labour camps for activities in one way or another connected merely with literature.
A feature of life during the post-Stalinist thaw in Moscow were regular, unauthorised gatherings of hundreds of people around the monument of the poet Mayakovsky, which turned into the first uncensored public readings of poetry. Alexander Ginzburg, a Moscow University journalism student, launched the literary journal Syntaxis in 1959, publishing the work of writers who had very little chance of appearing in the official press.
Overtly, the magazine had nothing to do with politics, but publication of three issues led, in 1960, to his expulsion from the university and two years' imprisonment. Even his most openly political work, the White Book, was literary in that it provided the first detailed account of the 1966 trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, whose only offence had been to publish their works in the west without Soviet authorisation. Alexander Ginzburg's arrest in January 1967 was followed, a year later, by a five-year sentence, during which he succeeded in having his marriage to Irina Zholkovskaya registered in the camp guardroom in 1969.
After his release in 1972, he was not allowed to live in Moscow, but by 1974 he was running the legendary Solzhenitsyn Fund for prisoners. From 1976, he was active in the Moscow Helsinki Group, monitoring the implementation of the 1975 Helsinki human rights agreement.
With an old typewriter, producing from four to 10 copies on very thin paper, he and other dissidents published chronicles of events which were then smuggled abroad and broadcast by the BBC, Radio Liberty and the Voice of America. This activity led to him being arrested in 1977, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1979 in exchange for two Soviet spies held in America.
Alexander Ginzburg and his comrades in dissident circles were confused by many in the West with their counterparts there - political activists who attempted to reform the rigid conservatism of capitalist society by the radical, frequently illegal, means available to them. But unlike them, of course, Alexander Ginzburg knew only a country of such tight political conformism, corruption and common complicity in crimes against humanity that a mere decency of public life - a refusal, say, to participate in a public meeting of the sinister political kind, or to sign a letter of condemnation of your politically incorrect office colleague - constituted a brave gesture that might result in dismissal and imprisonment.
Consequently, the notion of personal loyalty and friendship, the cult of conversation, warm gatherings around the kitchen table in private apartments, and the verbal - rather than written - culture of communication flourished and gave birth to a generation that felt an existence without the community of friends was equal to a death sentence. Thus, Alexander Ginzburg regarded his expulsion from Russia as banishment rather than liberation.
Born in Moscow on November 21st, 1936, Alexander Ginzburg was at least half-Jewish - he knew little of his father, and took his mother's surname: such a name made him conspicuous in a country preaching and practising uniformity in racial matters. During his second imprisonment, he was converted to Orthodox Christianity, but he defended believers of all faiths: he lived in Russia at a time when religious fundamentalism was part and parcel of being a Russian intellectual. But when a judge in his 1977 trial asked him his nationality once, he replied: "Zek" - prisoner.
From 1980 onwards, he worked in Paris as a freelance journalist and broadcaster connected with the émigré weekly Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought). While he took no fixed position himself, he fell victim to the conflicts between Westernisers and Slavophiles. Kind and emphatic in personal relationships, he suffered a lot when people whom he adored, whose freedom he had defended through years of his own imprisonment, became archenemies. Russia had become a kind of mental phantom in this war of words, while the real country, the former Soviet Union, was increasingly ignorant of émigré clashes that had once been a hot issue.
Alexander Ginzburg, in turn, had become, in his last years, quite sceptical of recent political developments in Russia, and, unlike many, decided not to go back. He became a French citizen in 1998; he leaves his wife and two sons.
Alexander Ilyich Ginzburg: born 1936; died, July 2002