Solzhenitsyn Aid Fund
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Solzhenitsyn Aid Fund
The Solzhenitsyn Aid Fund (officially Russian Public Fund to Aid Political Prisoners and their Families, also Fund for the Aid of Political Prisoners, Public Aid Fund) was a charity foundation and support network set up by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Ginzburg that distributed funds and material support to political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Founding The fund was formed on the initiative of writer and political prisoner Alexander Ginzburg. Families of arrested dissidents often suffered repercussions such as the loss of jobs and opportunities to study. During his time in labor camps, Ginzburg managed to coordinate relatives and friends to help other inmates and their families. This included support such as donating household goods for those in exile, helping relatives who faced expulsion from work, or offering places to stay in Moscow for wives who journeyed to visit their husbands in remote Siberian camps. After his ...
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system. Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. While still young, Solzhenitsyn lost his faith in Christianity, became an atheist, and embraced Marxism–Leninism. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a private letter. As a result of his experience in prison and the camps, he gradually became a philosophically-minded Eastern Orthodox Christian. As a result of the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was r ...
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Alexander Ginzburg
Alexander "Alik" Ilyich Ginzburg ( rus, Алекса́ндр Ильи́ч Ги́нзбург, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsandr ɨˈlʲjidʑ ˈɡʲinzbʊrk, a=Alyeksandr Il'yich Ginzburg.ru.vorb.oga; 21 November 1936 – 19 July 2002), was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident. 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. Biography A nephew of Yevgenia Ginzburg, and semi-orphan, 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. Dissident work At the end of 1959, Ginzburg issued the USSR's first samizdat literary magazine ''Phoenix'', with Yuri Galanskov. ...
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Political Prisoner
A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although numerous similar definitions have been proposed by various organizations and scholars, and there is a general consensus among scholars that "individuals have been sanctioned by legal systems and imprisoned by political regimes not for their violation of codified laws but for their thoughts and ideas that have fundamentally challenged existing power relations". The status of a political prisoner is generally awarded to individuals based on declarations of non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International, on a case-by-case basis. While such status are often widely recognized by the international public opinion, they are often rejected by individual governments accused of holding political prisoners, which tend to deny any bias in the ...
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Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national republics; in practice, both its government and its economy were highly centralized until its final years. It was a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with the city of Moscow serving as its capital as well as that of its largest and most populous republic: the Russian SFSR. Other major cities included Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk ( Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR), and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over and spanning eleven time zones. The country's roots lay in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government ...
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Political Prisoner
A political prisoner is someone imprisoned for their political activity. The political offense is not always the official reason for the prisoner's detention. There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although numerous similar definitions have been proposed by various organizations and scholars, and there is a general consensus among scholars that "individuals have been sanctioned by legal systems and imprisoned by political regimes not for their violation of codified laws but for their thoughts and ideas that have fundamentally challenged existing power relations". The status of a political prisoner is generally awarded to individuals based on declarations of non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International, on a case-by-case basis. While such status are often widely recognized by the international public opinion, they are often rejected by individual governments accused of holding political prisoners, which tend to deny any bias in the ...
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Soviet Dissidents
Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term ''dissident'' was used in the Soviet Union in the period from the mid-1960s until the fall of communism.Chronicle of Current Events (samizdat)
It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as ''dissidents'', the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society.
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Labor Camp
A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (especially prison farms). Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, abolished camps of forced labor. In the 20th century, a new category of labor camps developed for the imprisonment of millions of people who were not criminals ''per se'', but political opponents (real or imagined) and various so-called undesirables under communist and fascist regimes. Some of those camps were dubbed "reeducation facilities" for political coercion, but most others served as backbones of industry and agriculture for the benefit of the state, especially in times of war. Precursors Early-modern states could exploit ...
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Nobel Prize In Literature
) , image = Nobel Prize.png , caption = , awarded_for = Outstanding contributions in literature , presenter = Swedish Academy , holder = Annie Ernaux (2022) , location = Stockholm, Sweden , year = 1901 , reward = 10 million SEK (2022) , website = , year2 = 2022 , holder_label = Currently held by , previous = 2021 , main = 2022 , next = 2023 The Nobel Prize in Literature (here meaning ''for'' literature) is a Swedish literature prize that is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, "in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction" (original Swedish: ''den som inom litteraturen har producerat det utmärktaste i idealisk rigtning''). Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, the award is based on an author's body of work as ...
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The Gulag Archipelago
''The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation'' (russian: Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, ''Arkhipelag GULAG'') is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English and French the following year. It covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, through a narrative constructed from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and Solzhenitsyn's own experience as a Gulag prisoner. Following its publication, the book initially circulated in ''samizdat'' underground publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal ''Novy Mir'' in 1989, in which a third of the work was published in three issues. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ''The Gulag Archipelago'' has been officially published in Russia. Structure As structure ...
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Gulag
The Gulag, an acronym for , , "chief administration of the camps". The original name given to the system of camps controlled by the GPU was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (, )., name=, group= was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced labour camps which were set up by order of Vladimir Lenin, reaching its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word ''gulag'' in reference to each of the forced-labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union, including the camps that existed in the post-Lenin era. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, a large number of whom were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas or other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. In 1918–22, the agency was administered by the Cheka, follow ...
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Political Abuse Of Psychiatry In The Soviet Union
There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent. During the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, psychiatry was used to disable and remove from society political opponents ("dissidents") who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted the official dogma. The term "philosophical intoxication", for instance, was widely applied to the mental disorders diagnosed when people disagreed with the country's Communist leaders and, by referring to the writings of the Founding Fathers of Marxism–Leninism—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin—made them the target of criticism. Article 58-10 of the Stalin-era Criminal Code, "Anti-Soviet agitation", was to a considerable degree preserved in the new 1958 RSFSR Criminal Code as Article 70 "Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". In 1967, a weaker l ...
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Political Red Cross
Political Red Cross was the name borne by several organizations that provided aid to political prisoners in the Russian Empire and later in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union. The first organization using this name was founded in St. Petersburg in 1870 by L. I. Kornilova, Serdyukov, L. V. Sinegubov, and Vera Figner, and aided arrested Narodniki. In 1881 the ''Red Cross Society of the People's Will'' was founded by Yuri Bogdanovich of the People's Will movement. In the late 1890s the ''Society for Political Exiles and Prisoners'' was active in St. Petersburg. The society received funding for its activities from charity concerts, literary readings, fundraising events, and voluntary donations from the intelligentsia. After the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, assistance to prisoners was offered through a political prisoner's bureau of the St. Petersburg organization of the Political Red Cross, chaired by T. A. Bogdanovich with E. Benoit as treasurer. The Prisoner's Commissio ...
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