Alexander Ginzburg

During the Soviet period, Ginzburg cofounded and edited the samizdat poetry almanac Sintaksis. At the end of 1959, he issued the first samizdat literary magazine Phoenix, with Yuri Galanskov.

Between 1961 and 1969 he was sentenced three times to labor camps. In 1979, Ginzburg was released and expelled to the United States, along with four other political prisoners (Eduard Kuznetsov, Mark Dymshits, Valentin Moroz, and Georgy Vins) and their families, as part of a prisoner exchange.

In 1965, Alexander Ginzburg documented the trial of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky (Sinyavsky–Daniel trial). Having obtained a copy of closed-door court proceedings from the court stenographer, he compiled a White Book documenting the trial. He then sent copies of the book with his address to the KGB and the Chief Prosecutor's Office. The book also circulated in samizdat and was smuggled to the West. Along with Yuri Galanskov, Ginzburg was arrested in 1967, charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and sentenced to five years of forced labor (Galanskov-Ginzburg trial).

After his release in 1972, Ginzburg along with Alexander Solzhenitsyn initiated the Fund for the Aid of Political Prisoners. Based on the royalties derived from Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, it distributed funds and material support to political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union throughout the 1970-s and 1980-s.

In 1976, 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. 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. In April 1979, he was with four other dissidents deprived of his citizenship and exchanged for two Soviets who had been jailed for espionage.

Throughout his career, Ginzburg advocated nonviolent resistance. He believed in exposing human rights abuses by the Soviet Union and pressuring the government to follow its own laws. He made an effort to smuggle his writings abroad in order to increase external pressure on the Soviets.