FRANCE: Alexander Ginzburg, a Russian journalist and a principal dissident in the former Soviet Union, died yesterday in his adopted city of Paris aged 65, according to his wife, Ms Arina Ginzburg.
Ginzburg had long struggled with ill health, a legacy of the nine years he spent in Soviet forced labour camps and prisons for his activism.
Ms Yelena Bonner, widow of the dissident Academician and Nobel Peace prize winner Andrei Sakharov who died in 1989, expressed her sorrow at his death, describing him as a leading figure in the dissident movement.
"I saw Alek for the last time at a conference in Germany two years ago . . . He was a good friend, I knew him over 30 years. His death is a great loss," she said.
"He was a talented journalist, the drama of whose life was that he lived at a time when freedom of speech was repressed," Bonner added.
Ginzburg, who was born in Moscow in 1936, began his journalism studies in 1956, as the Soviet Union began the slow and painful process of de-Stalinisation.
The founder of the Soviet Union's first independent magazine, Syntaxes, which included the works of underground poets and writers, Ginzburg was arrested in 1960, after only three editions had been published. He was jailed three times but in 1979 was expelled from Russia and eventually settled in France.