Background

Lev Razgon was born on April 1, 1908, in Horki, Russian Empire (present Belarus), to a working-class Jewish family of Mendel Abramovich Razgon and Glika Izrailevna Shapiro. He had two brothers, Izrail Mendelevich Razgon and Abram Mendelevich Razgon. Izrail became a notable historian.

In the 1920s, Razgon's family moved from Horki to Moscow.

Education

In 1922, Razgon's parents and their four sons moved to the Soviet capital, where Lev was to study history at Moscow University (now Moscow State Pedagogical University) and start his life as a journalist and writer about science for young adults.

Career

Razgon moved to Moscow in the early 1920s where he worked as a writer. Sympathetic to those being arrested, Razgon himself was soon arrested for allegedly "spreading slanderous rumors." In the Gulag, he worked as a norm-setter, deciding how much work prisoners had to do to receive full ration. This "trusty" position put him in a complicated, and controversial, middle ground between camp officials and the other prisoners who did not have such privileged work. Razgon believed that having a trusty job was necessary, as he would not have been able to survive the hard labor of felling timber. Unlike many inmates of military age, he was not sent to the front during the war but sat it out until 1955, when Khrushchev amnestied vast numbers of the camp population.

Within a few years of his release and his return to Moscow, Razgon resumed writing, beginning in 1961 with a children's book, and continuing to publish every few years in the same vein, as well as stories based on the lives of famous scientists. It was not, however, until 1988 that he gained widespread acclaim as a writer, when excerpts from his memoirs, Nepridumannoe (Not Made-up), began appearing in Soviet journals. (They were translated into English by John Crowfoot as True Stories, 1996.)

He had been writing them for 20 years, with little hope, he confessed, that they would ever see the light of day. With the dawn of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s era of perestroika, Razgon was able to publish these personal stories in a novel that brought him great success in Russia and abroad. Razgon was the last survivor among almost 2,000 people who attended the 17th Bolshevik Party Congress in 1934, which made the nation’s only attempt to oust Stalin. Shortly after the congress, most of the delegates were executed on Stalin’s direct orders. After the collapse of communism, Razgon served on Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s Clemency Commission, which examined appeals by convicted criminals, especially those sentenced to death. As one of the most respected and well-known Russian Jews, Razgon also served as a board member of the Russian Jewish Congress since its founding in 1996.

Achievements

• When True Stories was first published in a Moscow literary journal in 1988 and 1989, the book was recognized as significantly different from most of the literature about the gulags. His stories of what happened to the famous Soviet political and intellectual figures of the 1930s, whom he came to know before and during his 17 years in the camps, are still considered a unique document about Russia’s totalitarian past.
  
  In 1998, to mark Razgon's 90th birthday, he was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland of the fourth class for his personal contribution to Russian literature and his active participation in the country's democratic reforms. Razgon also received the Andrei Sakharov Prize For Writer's Civic Courage.

Works

More photos

• book

  • True Stories

    (Razgon vividly shares these horrific memories due to a "t...)

    1997
  • La vie sans lendemains 1991
  • Julia, anima mia...
  • Nepridumannoe 1989
  • Odin god i vsya zhizn 1973
  • Sila tyazhesti 1979
  • Zrimoe znanie 1983
  • Moskovskie povesti 1983
  • Pered raskrytymi delami 1991
  • Plen v svoem otechestve 1994
  • Pozavchera i segodnya 1995

Religion

Lev Razgon was a follower of Judaism.

Politics

Razgon joined the Bolshevik Party and made a successful career as a journalist and as an author writing for young adults. Arrested in 1938 on the trumped-up charge of counter-revolutionary agitation, he survived many prisons, labor camps, and penal colonies. Following Stalin’s death, Razgon and his wife, Rika Berg, whom he met in a gulag, were released in 1956 and later rehabilitated.

Later in life, Razgon fell into the category of Gulag detainees who rejoined the Communist Party after their release. He did not resign from the Party until 1988.

Views

After obtaining his freedom, Razgon became a founding member of Memorial, an organization devoted to the memory of the millions of individuals who perished during Stalin’s purges.

Quotations: "Nevertheless, if you are working as a pair then either both ‘take it easy’ or both work hard so as not to let the other down."

Membership

In 1989 Razgon was among the founders of the Memorial Society. He was also a member of the International PEN Club.

• 

  Memorial is an international historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-Soviet states. It focuses on recording and publicizing the Soviet Union's totalitarian past, but also monitors human rights in Russia and other post-Soviet states.

  Memorial Society

  1989 - 1999

• 

  PEN International

Personality

Once, when he was in a labor camp, Razgon was placed in a punishment cell for neglecting to return a scrap of unused toilet paper to the guard. He recalled: "I ended up in a "bright" cell. A small cupboard of a room, two paces long and one and a half in width, and no windows. An iron frame with several cross-bars was fixed to the wall; this was the bed. It remained up all day and then, by some mechanism outside the cell, was let down for four hours during the night. The tiny room, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the so-called bed, and the enormous metal-lidded slop bucket were all covered in a dazzling white glossy paint. A 500-watt bulb shone from the ceiling, day and night. After an hour of this, you began to go crazy. Most of the time I stood in the corner with my eyes firmly closed."

In the new Russia Lev became a much-loved and respected figure, often in the public eye. His mind remained sharp and clear-sighted, and he continued writing and speaking publicly about his past experiences and in support of Russian democracy to the end of his life. He always had a twinkle in his eye; on frequent visits to London, even at the age of 90, he loved nothing more than a "pub crawl" accompanied by the younger members of our family.

Interests

• Politicians

  Boris Yeltsin

• Music & Bands

  Bach, Handel, Beethoven

Connections

After moving to Moscow Razgon met and married Oksana Boky, whose father was head of the Leningrad secret police, and whose mother's second husband, Ivan Moskvin, was an important member of Stalin's central committee. They had one daughter, Natasha.

In 1943, when he was a so-called "free" prisoner - allowed to live outside the camp but otherwise totally under its control - he met his second wife, Revekka Berg, known as Rika. They contrived to spend time together, secretly marrying in the camp.

Father:

Mendel Abramovich Razgon

Mother:

Glika Izrailevna Shapiro

Spouse:

Rika Efremovna Berg

In 1946, when Lev and Rika were released but were forbidden to live in Moscow, they established a home in Stavropol, in southern Russia, in a curtained-off corner of a room. There, in great poverty, they enjoyed a brief spell of happiness until, some months later, Rika was re-arrested and sent to Siberia. Soon afterwards Lev was again detained, and sent north to Usollag, in the Komi Republic.

Before they were separated Lev and Rika had agreed to keep in touch by writing. Lev, armed with a large number of stamps bought before his arrest, wrote every day, and Rika, almost unbelievably, received these precious letters from a series of post-mistresses, who carried them in canoes down the Siberian rivers.

Brother:

Izrail Mendelevich Razgon

Brother:

Abram Mendelevich Razgon

former spouse:

Oksana Glebovna Boky

When she was sent to a gulag, Oksana, a diabetic, was denied insulin and died during the cruel trip north in prison transport.

Daughter:

Natasha Razgon

Natasha was 18-months-old when her parents were arrested and was sent to live with her paternal grandmother.

Acquaintance:

Boris Yeltsin

With many other prominent writers, Razgon joined the Clemency Commission created by Boris Yeltsin and worked to secure the commutation of all death sentences to terms of imprisonment, arguing for the abolition of the death penalty in Russia and reform of the judicial system.

Acquaintance:

Bulat Okudzhava

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001
• Gulag Voices: An Anthology
  2011