Narrowly escaping the serious charge of anti-Soviet agitation which carried heavy penalties he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in an Arctic labour

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Narrowly escaping the serious charge of anti-Soviet agitation, which carried heavy penalties, he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in an Arctic labour camp on charges of forging documents (he had taken an exam for a friend).On release in 1962 he managed with difficulty to remain in Moscow, working as a night-watchman, librarian and lathe-operator. He returned unbowed to the dissident life, fighting in vain to recover confiscated Syntaxis materials from the KGB. He continued to be a champion of the independent press and followed an interest in art, arranging showings in his flat of foreign films on contemporary art.In 1964 he was detained for several days at the KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka, but was freed after writing a letter dissociating himself from support for his case in the West, which was published in distorted form in a Moscow paper.Horrified by the February 1966 trial of two writers, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, Ginzburg compiled the "White Book", published in the West, which provided the first detailed account of the trial. Arrested in January 1967, Ginzburg was put on trial in January 1968 with a fellow dissident, Yuri Galanskov, and punished with a five-year term of imprisonment.Ginzburg's personal life fell victim to the KGB. His marriage to his long-term partner Irina Zholkovskaya had been due to take place in January 1967, but his arrest came five days before. Irina did not give up, waging a relentless battle to marry Ginzburg.

At first Soviet officials insisted that prisoners were not allowed to marry but, following their persistent campaign and a hunger-strike by fellow prisoners, the couple were allowed to register their marriage in the camp guardroom in August 1969.Released in 1972, Ginzburg was not allowed to live in Moscow, so he settled in nearby Tarusa. In 1974 he became the first administrator of the Fund to Help Political Prisoners, founded by the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn with funds from his royalties and which the novelist later described as "a seemingly inconceivable undertaking under Soviet conditions". When Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was published in Russian in Paris in 1973, Ginzburg managed to have copies secretly printed in Georgia using photocopies from the Paris edition.In 1976 Ginzburg became one of the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which based its campaigning on Soviet human rights commitments under the 1975 Helsinki Accords. He specialised in helping oppressed Baptists, Pentecostals and Adventists, who earned his respect for their honesty and determination.The Helsinki Group attracted the particular ire of the KGB chief Yuri Andropov who, in a secret report to the Communist Party Central Committee in November 1976, took malicious pleasure in pointing out the Jewish origins of many of the activists of the "so-called Helsinki Group", including Ginzburg.In February 1977 he became the first member to be arrested, and was tried in July 1978. Questioned by the judge, he said he was "born in the Gulag Archipelago" – a reference to Solzhenitsyn's account of the Soviet prison camp system Asked his nationality, he replied "zek" – prisoner. He was sentenced to eight years of special-regime labour camp. The US President, Jimmy Carter, wrote Ginzburg an open letter of support.Once in the West, Ginzburg travelled the world to lobby for other dissidents, visiting Russia several times in recent years and voicing his fears about the country's future under President Vladimir Putin.

"I can't imagine a normal, liberal society taking shape for another 80 years," he declared gloomily last December.In 1995, after long years of refusal, one of the KGB's successors, the Federal Security Service, allowed Ginzburg to look at KGB files on his 1960 arrest and gave him selected documents from his personal file "It was for me a shocking moment," he declared. "They had saved almost everything."Despite the fall of Communism in Russia and the return of many political exiles, Ginzburg and his family decided to remain in Paris He took French citizenship in 1998. His later years were plagued by ill-health exacerbated by his nine years in Soviet labour camps, although his activism remained undimmed.Half-Jewish by descent (he had adopted his mother's Jewish surname as a young man to protest against Stalin's anti-Semitic campaigns), Ginzburg converted to Orthodox Christianity during one of his terms in labour camp, but he defended believers of all faiths who were denied the right to practise their faith freely.A passionate, tenacious and inventive campaigner for human rights (described by Solzhenitsyn as "legendary"), Ginzburg was respected for his absolute refusal to compromise with the KGB, unlike many in the broader dissident movement. He was also a man who epitomised the often grim humour and irony of the dissident movement.Felix Corley. The ability to organise the proverbial, er, party in a brewery must surely by now be replaced in common parlance by the ability to run a state-monopoly lottery. And, if one group of people in particular can organise neither, it must surely be Camelot plc.

Even the sleepy Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has finally woken up to the fact. One of the National Lottery's selling points was that it was presented as not really gambling. The move downmarket has eroded that respectability.Sir Richard Branson's strengths may be more limited than he thinks they are, but he could hardly have made a worse job of administering the Government's tax on dissatisfaction. He should have been allowed to run a rival lottery to Camelot's, and he should be allowed to do so now..