Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon was a Soviet Russian journalist, writer, a prisoner of the Gulag from 1938 to 1942 and again from 1950 to 1955 and, latterly, a human rights activist.
15 Facts About Lev Razgon
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2.
Later in life, Razgon fell into the category of Gulag detainees who rejoined the Communist Party after their release.
3.
Lev Razgon did not resign from the Party until 1988.
4.
At Ivan Moskvin's apartment, for instance, Lev Razgon met the future head of the NKVD Nikolai Yezhov.
5.
Subsequently, they were published as a book True Stories, and it was only in a separate and slightly later publication in the Ogonyok library series that Lev Razgon first admitted he had worked for Gleb Boky's organisation.
6.
On 18 April 1938, Lev Razgon was arrested and spent the next 17 years in prisons, camps, and exile.
7.
Lev Razgon describes the respect he received for being the son-in-law of Gleb Boky and an existence in which he usually worked in the office as a norm-setter, not out in the forest with the rest of the convicts, felling trees.
8.
Lev Razgon was an "honoured provocateur", in Antonov-Ovseyenko's words, and was arrested and sentenced together with a group of "too assiduous torturers"; he did not push a wheelbarrow in a camp, he did not fell wood in the taiga, and he was not dying of starvation.
9.
Unlike many others, Lev Razgon did not have to wait long for rehabilitation, after which he could settle in Moscow again and resume his writing.
10.
Lev Razgon waited until Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union before beginning to publish excerpts from his memoirs in a variety of Soviet literary magazines.
11.
In 1989, Lev Razgon was among the founders of the Memorial Society.
12.
Lev Razgon was a member of the International PEN Club.
13.
In October 1993, during the confrontation between President Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet, Lev Razgon was one of the signatories of the Letter of Forty-Two.
14.
Lev Razgon's memoirs have been translated into French, Italian and English and five other languages.
15.
Lev Razgon received the Andrei Sakharov Prize for Writer's Civic Courage.