Alexander Galich

Origins and early life

Alexander Galich was born Alexander Aronovich Ginzburg on 19 October 1918 in Ekaterinoslav, today's Dnipro, into a family of Jewish intellectuals.

Work and career

As an adult he converted to Russian Orthodoxy — this fiche says so plainly, and the Soviet state never ceased to count him a Jew: it was his official Jewish nationality that later furnished the exit visa. He made a comfortable first career as a playwright and screenwriter, and then threw it away for the truth: from the early 1960s his satirical, grieving songs — about the camps, the informers, the murdered Jewish actor Mikhoels, the little man crushed by the system — spread across the Soviet Union on clandestine tape recordings, the magnitizdat.

The state answered: expelled from the Writers' Union in 1971, from the film union, stripped of income, he was forced into exile in 1974 on an Israeli visa and worked for Radio Liberty in the West. He died in Paris on 15 December 1977, electrocuted by his own antenna equipment, and is buried there; his songs came home before the regime fell.