Evgeniia Semenovna Ginzburg's memoirs of her eighteen years in the gulag gained international renown both as the first female eyewitness account of the camps and as a literary masterpiece. Ginzburg was born on 20 December 1904 into a family of the Moscow Jewish intelligentsia; her father was a pharmacist. She spent her childhood and youth in Kazan', where she attended the University of Kazan' and then taught history and worked as a Communist Party activist. Later she went into journalism, becoming assistant head of the cultural department of the local newspaper, Red Tartary. She married Pavel Vasil'evich Aksenov, a high-ranking official in the Tartar Regional Communist Party Committee and chairman of the Kazan' city council. They had two children, Alesha and Vasilii.

In 1937 Ginzburg was arrested; her husband was arrested shortly afterward. A military tribunal sentenced Ginzburg under Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code to ten years in solitary confinement...