Virtually nothing was banned in the USSR.
The Washington Post July 20, 2002 Saturday Soviet Dissident Alexander Ginzburg Dies
BYLINE: Martin Weil, Washington Post Staff Writer
Alexander Ginzburg, 65, who was persecuted, imprisoned and exiled as a leader of the dissident intellectual movement that worked for human rights and individual freedom in the Soviet Union, died July 19 in Paris.
Mr. Ginzburg is often credited with being a founder of the Samizdat, or self-publishing movement, by which intellectuals put forward their ideas and challenged government repression.
The Associated Press attributed reports of Mr. Ginzburg's death to Russian news accounts. No cause of death was given. After being expelled from the Soviet Union, Mr. Ginzburg came first to the United States, and then made France a base for writing, lecturing and worldwide campaigning.
The courage and dedication of the dissident movement -- including such figures as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nathan Shcharansky and Andrei Sakharov -- have been described as important to the ultimate downfall of Soviet communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Individual loose sheets -- often poetry, typed, handwritten and copied by duplicating machine -- began appearing in Moscow a few years after Stalin's death. Mr. Ginzburg, was credited with the creation in 1960 of what was considered the first magazine to circumvent the Soviet government's publishing monopoly.
The magazine's name has been translated as Syntax, or Syntaxis, and on its pages appeared underground intellectuals, writers and poets not officially sanctioned by the government, taking sly aim, through literary techniques, at some of the abuses and hypocrisies of the Soviet regime.
It lasted only a few issues, but the authorities recognized Mr. Ginzburg's work with a two-year prison sentence. In 1965, dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested, and they went on trial the next year. In the "White Book," Mr. Ginzburg offered an account of what the dissidents viewed as a blatantly political prosecution.
This drew greater worldwide attention to Soviet repression and helped amplify the voices of the dissidents. For Mr. Ginzburg, it brought a closed trial and new five-year prison term.
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