Alexander "Alik" Ilyich Ginzburg (; 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. He also cofounded the poetry almanac Sintaksis. After three issues, he was expelled from Moscow University, arrested and sentenced to two years in a labour camp. Released in 1962, he was unable to find regular work, but continued to patronise underground art, by distributing literature and holding private film shows. He was returned to Lubyanka prison for a short time in 1964. In December 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. In December 1966, he summoned before the KGB and ordered to repudiate the White Book, which he refused to do. He was arrested on 23 January 1967. His case was linked with Galanskov's, though the only direct link between their activities was that they both relied on the same typist, Vera Lashkova. They were co-defendants at the Trial of the Four, at the conclusion of which, on 12 January 1968, Ginzburg was sentenced to five years of forced labour. In a labour camp in Mordvinia, Ginzburg began a hunger strike in May 1969 because the authorities had prevented him from marrying his fiancee, Irena Zholkovskaya, who was consequently prevented from visiting him. In June, he was allowed to register his marriage, but she was then sacked from her job as a teacher. For this and other protests