Evgenia Ginzburg
Author profile
born
in Moscow, Russian Federation
December 20, 1906
died
May 25, 1977
gender
female
genre
About this author
Yevgenia Ginzburg (Russian language: Евгения Семёновна Гинзбург) was a Russian historian and writer. Her latinized name Eugenia is frequently used in the West.
Soon after Yevgenia Ginzburg was born into the family of a Jewish pharmacist in Moscow, her family moved to Kazan. In 1920 she entered the social sciences department of Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy.
She worked as a rabfak (рабфак, рабочий факультет, worker's faculty) teacher, then as an assistant at the University. Shortly thereafter, she married Pavel Aksyonov, the mayor (председатель горсовета) of Kazan and a member of the Central Executive Committee (ЦИК) of the USSR. After becoming a Communist Party member, Ginzburg continued her successful career as educator...more
Yevgenia Ginzburg (Russian language: Евгения Семёновна Гинзбург) was a Russian historian and writer. Her latinized name Eugenia is frequently used in the West.
Soon after Yevgenia Ginzburg was born into the family of a Jewish pharmacist in Moscow, her family moved to Kazan. In 1920 she entered the social sciences department of Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy.
She worked as a rabfak (рабфак, рабочий факультет, worker's faculty) teacher, then as an assistant at the University. Shortly thereafter, she married Pavel Aksyonov, the mayor (председатель горсовета) of Kazan and a member of the Central Executive Committee (ЦИК) of the USSR. After becoming a Communist Party member, Ginzburg continued her successful career as educator, journalist and administrator. Her oldest son, Alexei Fedorov, from her first marriage to Doctor Fedorov, was born in 1926 and died in the Great Patriotic War. Her younger son Vasily Aksyonov, born in 1932, went on to become a famous writer.
In February 1937, she was expelled from the party ranks and soon arrested for her alleged connections to the Trotskyists. (See also Great Purge). Her parents were also arrested but released two months later. Her husband was arrested in July and sentenced to 15 years of "corrective labor" with the confiscation of his property. (Articles 58-7 and 11). In August, Yevgenia was also sentenced to ten years.
Yevgenia experienced first-hand the infamous Moscow Lefortovo and Butyrka prisons, the Yaroslavl "Korovniki", as well as the journey on a prison train across the country to Vladivostok, and finally to Kolyma in the cargo hold of the steamer Jurma (Джурма). At Magadan, she worked at a camp hospital, but was soon sent into the cold depths of the Gulag and assigned to so-called common jobs, where she quickly became an emaciated dokhodyaga ("goner"). A Crimean German doctor, Anton Walter, probably saved her life by recommending her for a nursing position. Anton had been deported due to his German heritage, Yevgenia due to her allegedly critical attitude to the Soviet system. They married later.[1]
In February 1949, Ginzburg was formally released but had to stay in Magadan for five more years. She found a position at a kindergarten and secretly started to work on her memoirs. In October 1950 she was arrested again and exiled to Krasnoyarsk region, but before she left, her destination was changed to Kolyma. After Stalin's death in 1953, Ginzburg was able to visit Moscow and was fully rehabilitated in 1955, as were millions of wrongly convicted, many posthumously.
She returned to Moscow, worked as a reporter and continued her work on her magnum opus memoir, Journey into the Whirlwind (English title). After the book was completed (1967), all attempts to publish it in the USSR failed for political reasons and the manuscript was smuggled abroad, where it was widely published. Eventually, her book included 2 parts, in original Russian named "Krutoi marshrut I" and "Krutoi marshrut II" -- "Harsh Route" or "Steep Route."(less)
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