Family and Early Career
Born in Moscow, her parents were Solomon Natanovich Ginzburg (a Jewish pharmacist) and Revekka Markovna Ginzburg. The family moved to Kazan in 1909.
In 1920, she began to study social sciences at Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy. She worked as a rabfak (рабфак, рабочий факультет, workers' faculty) teacher. 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. Shortly thereafter, on May 25, she was named head of the newly created department of the history of Leninism. However, by the fall of 1935, she was forced to quit the university.
She first married a doctor Dmitriy Fedorov, by whom she had a son, Alexei Fedorov, born in 1926. He died in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad. Around 1930, she married Pavel Aksyonov, the mayor (председатель горсовета) of Kazan and a member of the Central Executive Committee (ЦИК) of the USSR. Her son by this marriage, Vasily Aksyonov, born in 1932, became a well-known writer. After becoming a Communist Party member, Ginzburg continued her successful career as educator, journalist and administrator.
Read more about this topic: Yevgenia Ginzburg
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