Dissident poet Aleksandr Ginzburg dead

After nine years in prisons and labor camps, Mr. Ginzburg and four others were flown to the United States in 1979 in exchange for two convicted spies.

He had attracted the attention of the Soviet authorities in 1959, with a typewritten magazine called Syntax, containing bitter poems that reflected his generation’s anger and disillusionment with the Soviet Union. It became the first of the so-called samizdat (or self-published) journals of the post-Stalin period. / Nachruf NYT 20.7.02