Leonid Ivanovich Borodin (April 14, 1938 – November 25, 2011) was a Russian novelist and journalist.

Born in Irkutsk

Irkutsk

Irkutsk is a city and the administrative center of Irkutsk Oblast, Russia, one of the largest cities in Siberia. Population: .-History:In 1652, Ivan Pokhabov built a zimovye near the site of Irkutsk for gold trading and for the collection of fur taxes from the Buryats. In 1661, Yakov Pokhabov...

, Borodin was a Christian and a Soviet dissident

Dissident

A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

. 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

Yuli Daniel

Yuli Markovich Daniel was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator and political prisoner.He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak and Yu. Petrov .-Early life and World War II:...

 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

Perm

Perm is a city and the administrative center of Perm Krai, Russia, located on the banks of the Kama River, in the European part of Russia near the Ural Mountains. From 1940 to 1957 it was named Molotov ....

-36 Maximum Security Camp (ITK-6), as well as five years' internal exile. Released after four years, in the perestroika

Perestroika

Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...

 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

Solzhenitsyn Prize

The Solzhenitsyn Prize is a a non-governmental Russian literary award established by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1997.The $25,000 prize is awarded for "works in which troubles of the Russian life are shown with rare moral purity and sense of tragedy, for consecutiveness and...

, 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

Public Chamber of Russia

The Public Chamber is a state institution with 126 members created in 2005 in Russia to analyze draft legislation and monitor the activities of the parliament, government and other government bodies of Russia and its Federal Subjects. It has a role similar to an oversight committee and has...

.

Works in English translation

• Partings, The Harvill Press, 1988.
• The Year of Miracle and Grief, Quartet Books, 1988.
• The Third Truth, Harpercollins, 1992.
• The Story of a Strange Time, Harpercollins, 1993.

External links

• 2002 interview after receiving the Solzhenitsyn Prize
• Moskva Journal
• New York Times review of Partings
• New York Times review of The Year of Miracle and Grief