Ginzburg was educated in Moscow, and worked as a lathe operator and part time journalist after leaving school, then as an actor, but had to give up acting in 1959, after falling from a third storey window.

Released in 1962, he was unable to find regular work, but continued to patronise underground art, by distributing literature and holding private film shows.

Ginzburg was released when his five year prison term ended, on 22 January 1972, and was allowed to settle in Tarusa, 50 miles south of Moscow.

[4] Based on the royalties derived from Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, it distributed funds and material support to political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Ginzburg was given the task of monitoring the State's persecution of the smaller Christian denominations, for which he was, again, arrested in 1978 and sentenced to an eight-year prison term.

He believed in exposing human rights abuses by the Soviet Union and pressuring the government to follow its own laws.