Vladimir Voinovich — writer with roots in the USSR
Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich was born on 26 September 1932 in Stalinabad, now Dushanbe, the capital of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. He served in the Soviet army from 1951 to 1955, and in 1956 moved to Moscow, where he studied at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute in 1957-59 and worked for radio.
In the early 1960s he made his name with stories and with the lyrics of a popular song about cosmonauts, and joined the Union of Soviet Writers. In the same years he began The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a comic novel about a hapless Red Army soldier left to guard a crashed plane in a village at the start of the Second World War. It could not be published in the Soviet Union; the manuscript went abroad, an excerpt appeared in the West in 1969, and the book was published in Paris in 1975. His satire of the housing privileges of Soviet writers, The Ivankiad, followed in 1976.
He signed letters in defence of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, and later of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, and in 1974 was expelled from the Writers' Union. In 1975 he was summoned to a meeting with KGB officers, which he afterwards described in an open letter to the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov. He also helped get Vasily Grossman's suppressed novel Life and Fate to the West, on microfilm secretly photographed by Andrei Sakharov. In 1980 he was told to leave the country; on 21 December, at the invitation of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, he arrived in Munich with his wife and their seven-year-old daughter, and the next year, in 1981 according to Britannica and the Moscow Times, was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
In Germany he worked for Radio Liberty and wrote Moscow 2042 (1986), a satirical anti-utopia set in a future communist Moscow, and the short novel The Fur Hat. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev restored his citizenship, and in the following decades he divided his time between Munich and Moscow. Monumental Propaganda (2000) returned to the Chonkin world of the provinces, and the Chonkin cycle, begun in the 1960s, was completed in 2007. In later life he also took up painting.
He died in Moscow on 27 July 2018, aged eighty-five. His daughter, Olga Voinovich, is a German-language writer.
Tracing the roots — Stalinabad, Tajik SSR (now Dushanbe, Tajikistan)
Born in Stalinabad, in the Tajik SSR, in 1932, he served in the Soviet army, became a writer in Moscow, was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1974, left for West Germany in 1980 and lost his Soviet citizenship; it was restored in 1990.
Stalinabad, Tajik SSR (now Dushanbe, Tajikistan). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.