Leonid Borodin

Who was Leonid Borodin?

Leonid Ivanovich Borodin was a Russian novelist and journalist.

Born in Irkutsk, Borodin was a Christian and a Soviet dissident. In the 1960s he belonged to the anti-Communist All-Russian Social-Christian Union. He was arrested and imprisoned in the 'strict regime' Camp 17 in 1967, and went on hunger strike there with Yuli Daniel and Aleksandr Ginzburg in 1969. After his release in 1973, Borodin’s works were smuggled out of the Soviet Union. The publication in English translation of The Story of a Strange Time led to his arrest in 1982 on charges of 'anti-Soviet propaganda'. He was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour in Perm-36 Maximum Security Camp, as well as five years' internal exile. Released after four years, in the perestroika era, Borodin was allowed to visit the west with his wife.

Borodin was the subject and first-person narrator of the 2001 film Leonid Borodin: Looking through the Years by Viacheslav Novikov.

A winner of many literary prizes, including the 2002 Solzhenitsyn Prize, Borodin was editor-in-chief of Moskva, a popular literary magazine. In 2005 he was appointed to the first convocation of the Public Chamber of Russia.