Lev Razgon

Lev Emmanuilovich Razgon (Лев Эммануи́лович Разго́н) (April 1, 1908, Gorki in the province of Mogilev, &mdash; September 8, 1999, Moscow) was a Soviet and Russian writer, detainee of the Gulag, human rights activist.

In 1932, he graduated from the history faculty of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute.

Razgon joined the NKVD in 1933 and for two years worked in its special department headed by his father-in-law. In 1937, after the arrest of his father-in-law Gleb Bokiy, Razgon was expelled from the NKVD.

On 18 April 1938, he was arrested and spent the next 17 years in prisons, camps, and exile. According to Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, who called Razgon a “honoured provocateur”, he was repressed together with a group of “too assiduous torturers”, did not push a wheelbarrow in a camp, did not fell wood in taiga, and was not dying of starvation, but he worked as a work-assignment clerk in the prison camp and was an ally of governor of an operative Cheka department. In 1955, he was released and rehabilitated.

After rehabilitation he resumed his writing and published a number of books while writing his memoirs about gulag. He started publishing excerpts from his memoirs in literary magazines in 1987.

In 1988, the Ogonyok magazine published Lev Razgon's writing Zhena Prezidenta (President's Wife), an unbelievable but true story featuring Ekaterina Kalinina, the wife of the first Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin, who served in labor camps in Komi taiga.

Together with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Razgon was among the founders of the Memorial Society. He was a member of the International PEN and the Commission for Clemency created by Boris Yeltsin that worked for the abolition of death penalty in Russia and reform of the judicial system. In October 1993, Razgon was one of the signatories of the Letter of Forty-Two.

Among his books are Shestaja Stantsiya (The Sixth Station, 1964), Odin God i Vsya Zhizn (One Year and All Life, 1973), Sila Tyazhesti (Force of Gravity, 1979), Zrimoe Znanie (Visible Knowledge, 1983), Moskovskie Povesti (The Moscow Stories, 1983), Nepridumannoye (The Not Made-up, 1988), Pered Raskrytymi Delami (Before Revealed Cases, 1991), Pozavchera i Segodnya (The Day before Yesterday and Today, 1995). His book Nepridumannoye was also published under the title Plen v Svoyom Otechestve (Captivity in One's Own Homeland, 1994), and was translated into English under the title True Stories in 1995.

Awards
In 1998, Razgon was honoured with the Order of Merit for the Fatherland of the fourth class for his personal contribution to national literature, active participation in democratic reforms in Russia and in connection with his ninetieth birthday. Razgon was also honoured with the Andrei Sakharov award “For Writer’s Civil Courage.”