Butyrskaya prison, usually known simply as Butyrka, is a prison in the Tverskoy District of central Moscow, Russia. In Imperial Russia it served as the central transit prison.
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, feminist and social reformer. She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society. Additionally, she authored several popular books, with her most notable being The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain and Industrial Democracy, co-authored by her husband Sidney Webb, where she coined the term "collective bargaining" as a way to discuss the negotiation process between an employer and a labor union. As a feminist and social reformer, she criticised the exclusion of women from various occupations as well as campaigning for the unionisation of female workers, pushing for legislation that allowed for better hours and conditions.
Kolyma or Kolyma Krai is a historical region in the Russian Far East that includes the basin of Kolyma River and the northern shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as the Kolyma Mountains. It is bounded to the north by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and by the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. Kolyma Krai was never formally defined and over time it was split among various administrative units. As of 2023, it consists roughly of the Magadan Oblast, north-eastern areas of Yakutia, and the Bilibinsky District of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation, he took a job in Stalino in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels.
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He became known in the West as the author of The Burn and of Generations of Winter, a family saga following three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.
Jānis Rudzutaks was a Latvian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He was executed during the Great Purge.
Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg was a Soviet writer who served an 18-year sentence in the Kolyma Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia.
Yuri Timofeyevich Galanskov was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals (Psikhushkas). He died in a labor camp.
Alexander "Alik" Ilyich Ginzburg, 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 and their families, as part of a prisoner exchange.
Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Lithuanian literature concerns the art of written works created by Lithuanians throughout their history.
Ralph Ginzburg was an American editor, publisher, journalist, and photographer. He was best known for publishing books and magazines on erotica and art and for his conviction in 1963 for violating federal obscenity laws.
Moisei Yakovlevich Ginzburg was a Soviet constructivist architect, best known for his 1929 Narkomfin Building in Moscow.
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
Benjamin Fain was an Israeli physicist, professor-emeritus, and former refusenik.
The Alexander Herzen Foundation was a non-profit foundation, legally established in 1969 in Amsterdam, dedicated to publish samizdat manuscripts from dissidents in the former Soviet Union in the original language or in translation. The Alexander Herzen Foundation was the first to publish accounts of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and the works of Andrei Amalrik, Yuli Daniel, Larisa Bogoraz, Andrei Sinyavsky, Pavel Litvinov and others in the West. The Foundation was ended legally in 1998.
Cursed Days is a book by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, compiled of diaries and notes he made while in Moscow and Odessa in 1918-1920. Fragments from it were published in 1925-1926 by the Paris-based Vozrozhdenye newspaper. In its full version Cursed Days appeared in the Vol.X of The Complete Bunin (1936), compiled and published in Berlin by the Petropolis publishing house. In the USSR the book remained banned up until the late 1980s. Parts of it were included in the 1988 Moscow edition of The Complete Bunin. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cursed Days became immensely popular in its author's homeland. Since 1991, no less than fifteen separate editions of Bunin's diary/notebook have been published in Russia. The English translation, made by Bunin scholar Thomas Gaiton Marullo, was published in 1998 in the United States by Chicago-based Ivan R. Dee Publishers.
Within the Whirlwind is a 2009 German film directed by Marleen Gorris and based on the autobiographical book Journey into the Whirlwind by Yevgenia Ginzburg. It stars Emily Watson and Pam Ferris. Watson has described the film as "the most stretching thing I’ve done as a mature actress."
Art and culture took on a variety of forms in the forced labor camps of the Gulag system that existed across the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century. Theater, music, visual art, and literature played a role in camp life for many of the millions of prisoners who passed through the Gulag system. Some creative endeavors were initiated and executed by prisoners themselves, while others were overseen by the camp administration. Some projects benefited from prisoners who had been professional artists; others were organized by amateurs. The robust presence of the arts in the Gulag camps is a testament to the resourcefulness and resilience of prisoners there, many of whom derived material benefits and psychological comfort from their involvement in artistic projects.
The Trial of the Four, also Galanskov–Ginzburg trial, was the 1968 trial of Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexey Dobrovolsky and Vera Lahkova for their involvement in samizdat publications. The trial took place in Moscow City Court on January 8–12. All four defendants were sentenced to terms in labour camps. The trial played a major part in consolidating the emerging human rights movement in the Soviet Union.
