14 Facts About Alexander Ginzburg

In 1979, Ginzburg was released and expelled to the United States, along with four other political prisoners and their families, as part of a prisoner exchange.

Alexander Ginzburg was relative of Yevgenia Ginzburg and semi-orphan, Alexander Ginzburg.

Alexander Ginzburg was educated in Moscow, and worked as a lathe operator and part time journalist after leaving school, then as an actor, but had to give up acting in 1959, after falling from a third storey window.

Alexander Ginzburg was returned to Lubyanka prison for a short time in 1964.

In December 1965, Alexander Ginzburg documented the trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky.

Alexander Ginzburg then sent copies of the book with his address to the KGB and the Chief Prosecutor's Office.

Alexander Ginzburg's case was linked with Galanskov's, though the only direct link between their activities was that they both relied on the same typist, Vera Lashkova.

Alexander Ginzburg was released when his five year prison term ended, on 22 January 1972, and was allowed to settle in Tarusa, 50 miles south of Moscow.

Alexander Ginzburg was a friend of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, with whom he initiated the Fund for the Aid of Political Prisoners.

Alexander Ginzburg had power of attorney over the fund after Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the USSR in February 1974, but in April, he was placed under police surveillance and forbidden to leave the district of Talusa where he lived, even to walk as far as the local cinema, and was forbidden to leave the house after 8.00pm.

In 1976, Alexander Ginzburg became a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which monitored breaches of the human rights guarantees the Soviet government signed up to in the 1975 Helsinki accords.

Alexander Ginzburg was given the task of monitoring the State's persecution of the smaller Christian denominations, for which he was, again, arrested in 1978 and sentenced to an eight-year prison term.

Alexander Ginzburg believed in exposing human rights abuses by the Soviet Union and pressuring the government to follow its own laws.

Alexander Ginzburg made an effort to smuggle his writings abroad in order to increase external pressure on the Soviets.