THE PUBLIC FUND FOR ASSISTANCE TO POLITICAL PRISONERS AND THEIR FAMILIES

THE PUBLIC FUND FOR ASSISTANCE TO POLITICAL PRISONERS AND THEIR FAMILIES (Fund for Aid to Political Prisoners, Russian Public Fund, Solzhenitsyn Fund) — a charitable organization founded in the winter of 1973/1974 by agreement between Alexander SOLZHENITSYN and Alexander GINZBURG; the latter became the Fund’s first manager in the spring of 1974. The Fund continued, systematized, and institutionalized the previously spontaneous and disorganized collection of money to help people subjected to political persecution (primarily the families of political prisoners). At the same time, the creation of the Fund de facto revived the pre-revolutionary tradition of assisting political prisoners, which had continued in the first decades of Soviet rule and was interrupted only in 1937 with the closure of the legally operating Committee for Aid to Political Prisoners (“Pompolit”), headed by Y. P. Peshkova. The main source of the Fund’s income was Solzhenitsyn’s royalties from the publication of his book “The Gulag Archipelago” in various countries; other voluntary donations, including those collected within the country, also went into the Fund’s coffers. The Fund’s activities were strictly regulated by its rules; reports were published. The Fund was managed by a manager. After the arrest of A. GINZBURG on February 4, 1977, his wife, Irina Zholkovskaya-Ginzburg, took over the duties of manager; after she left the country, the Fund’s managers were Galina Salova, Tatyana Khodorovich, Malva Landa, Kronid Lyubarsky, Sergei Khodorovich, Andrei Kistyakivsky, and Sergei Mikhailov. Regional managers operated in a number of cities and regions of the USSR. In different years in Ukraine, these were Vira LISOVA (Kyiv), Olena ANTONIV (Galicia), and Yevhen Zakharov (Kharkiv). The Fund provided one-time assistance to those being released from imprisonment and paid for relatives’ trips to visit political prisoners, as well as for legal expenses. This activity brought together many people who became voluntary helpers of the Fund; in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Fund was one of the largest and best-known dissident associations.

The Fund’s managers and their assistants, as well as those helped by the Fund, were constantly subjected to judicial and extrajudicial persecution in the USSR (on February 29, 1984, an amendment was introduced to Art. 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, corresponding to Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR , that allowed for prosecution for charitable activities funded by money from abroad). In 1983, as a result of a complex KGB operation that included repression, pressure, and provocations, the Fund’s public activities ceased.

In the early 1990s, the Solzhenitsyn Fund resumed its work in Russia; it is now engaged in publishing activities and helps victims of past political repressions who are in need of assistance.