Grigory Svirsky
Grigory Tsezarevich Svirsky was a Russian-born Canadian writer.
Svirsky was born in Ufa in September 1921. He was a military pilot during World War II from 1941 to 1944, then worked as a journalist. After publishing several books, Svirsky openly criticized censorship in the Soviet Union, and all his writings were forbidden and destroyed in 1968. Svirsky also criticized the 1968 suppression of the Prague Spring by Soviet military forces. He was forced to emigrate to Israel on the personal request from KGB director Yuri Andropov in 1972.
He published numerous fiction and non-fiction books, short stories, and plays. He was also an active participant of political discussions in RuNet, Russian blogosphere.
One of his recent books was about the Internet brigades - teams of FSB agents who conduct psychological operations in the internet against political bloggers. These "internet brigades" allegedly disseminate disinformation and prevent free discussion of undesirable subjects in the internet forums by harassing and intimidating the bloggers He was interested in moral aspects of their work: "It seems that offending, betraying, or even "murdering" people in the virtual space is easy. This is like killing an enemy in a video game: one do not see a disfigured body or eyes of the person who is dying right in front of you. However, human soul lives by its own basic laws that force it to pay the price in the real life".
He died in 2016.
His books
- Dead end of Lenin, Moscow, Publishing house "Soviet writer", 1962.
- Hostages: The personal testimony of a Soviet Jew. Vintage/Ebury, 1976,.
- Polar tragedy, Frankfurt, "Posev", 1976., French translation: Tragedie Polarie, Quine, Montreal, 1978.
- Breakthrough, New York, 1983., Hebrew translation: Hapriza by Maoz, Israel, 1990.
- At the execution place. The literature of moral resistance, 1946-1986. Moscow, 1992. English version: A history of post-Soviet writing , Ardis, Ann Arbor, USA, 1981,.
- Soviet penal battalions
- Luba means "love" or never-ending Nord-Ost. A non-fiction story. Jerusalem, 2004
- Farewell to Russia, New York, 1986
- Mother and stepmother, "Scholar", Toronto, Canada, 1990.
- Forbidden story, "Scholar", Toronto, Canada, 1990.
- Escape, Jerusalem, 1994
- Little Andrei, Moscow, 1998.
- On the islands of George Washington, New York, 1998
- Fuel pump kings. Russian gangsters in America 2000.
- Masters of disguise. A story of Russian leaders. Moscow. 2002.
- My Galich, a story of Alexander Galich