Evgeniya Ginzburg

Evgenia Ginzburg was born in Moscow on December 20, 1904, into the family of Solomon Abramovich (Natanovich) Ginzburg (1876–1938), a pharmacist originally from Grodno, and his wife Revekka Markovna (1881–1949), a native of Vilno.

In 1909 she moved with her parents to Kazan, where she studied at a private gymnasium and later at school.

After school, in 1920, Evgenia entered Kazan University, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and then transferred to the third year of the Social Department of the Kazan Eastern Pedagogical Institute, where she studied history and philology. She completed her studies in June 1924 (specializing in history; later she defended a dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences). She got a job at the institute, taught at the Turkic-Tatar workers’ preparatory school and at the experimental school attached to the pedagogical institute. She earned extra money as a kindergarten teacher and wrote articles for the newspaper Krasnaya Tatariya.

In 1924 she met and soon married a doctor and lecturer at the First Leningrad Medical Institute, Dmitry Fyodorov. Two years later the couple had a son, Aleksey. However, this marriage proved short-lived. Aleksey and his father both died in 1941 in German-besieged Leningrad.

In 1930 Evgenia Ginzburg served as acting associate professor at the Department of History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Two years later she became a member of the VKP(b), and from 1933 she was an associate professor at the Department of the History of Leninism at Kazan State University. Around the same time she met her future second husband, Pavel Aksenov, who by then had already made a brilliant party career, serving as chairman of the Kazan City Soviet and as a member of the Central Auditing Commission. In 1932, Aksenov and Ginzburg had a son, Vasily, the future writer. In the family, besides Vasily and Ginzburg’s son Aleksey, Aksenov’s daughter Maya was also being raised. Evgenia Ginzburg and