Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg (December 20, 1904[1] – May 25, 1977) (Russian: Евге́ния Соломо́новна Ги́нзбург[2]) was a Soviet writer who served an 18-year sentence in the Kolyma Gulag.

In April 1934, Ginzburg was officially confirmed as a docent (approximately equivalent to an associate professor in western universities), specializing in the history of the All-Union Communist Party.

Around 1930, she married Pavel Aksyonov, the mayor (председатель горсовета) of Kazan and a member of the Central Executive Committee (ЦИК) of the USSR.

Following the assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov on December 1, 1934, Ginzburg, like many communists (see the Great Purge), was accused of participating in a "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group" led by Professor Nikolay Naumovich Elvov and concentrated in the editorial board of the newspaper Krasnaya Tatariia (Red Tataria) where she was employed.

[5] From the day of her arrest, and unlike most of those around her, she forcefully denied the NKVD's accusations and never accepted any role in the supposed "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization".

Her husband was arrested in July and sentenced to 15 years of "corrective labor" and his property confiscated under Articles 58-7 and 11 of the RSFSR Penal Code.

[7] In one of the most revealing chapters of her autobiography, Ginzburg expressed great relief upon hearing the verdict, because she had feared up to that very moment that she would be condemned to death: To live!

Do you [the judges], with your codfish faces, really think you can go on robbing and murdering for another ten years, that there aren't people in the Party who will stop you sooner or later?

I shook back my hair curled so carefully before facing the court, so as not to disgrace the memory of Charlotte Corday.

She crossed the USSR on a prison train to Vladivostok and was put in the cargo hold of the steamer Jurma (Джурма) whose destination was Magadan.

A Crimean German doctor, Anton Walter, probably saved her life by recommending her for a nursing position in Taskan; they eventually married.

After Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 and following Ginzburg's repeated, vigorous appeals to various authorities to have her case reconsidered, she was released from the exile (on 25 June 1955) and allowed to return to Moscow.

The film features actress Emily Watson as Yevgenia Ginzburg, with Pam Ferris and Ben Miller in other roles.