Julius Margolin
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Julius Margolin (Russian: Юлий (Юлиус) Борисович Марголин, October 14, 1900 — January 21, 1971) was a Jewish writer and political activist, an author of the book A Travel to the Land Ze-Ka.
"In 1947, when Julius Margolin finished his book about the GULAG, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had just begun serving his prison term."[1]
Margolin was born in Pinsk, West Belarus, then in the Russian Empire, now Belarus. Since 1921, it belonged to Poland. In 1939, he moved to Palestine. Several months later he was visiting his relatives in Pinsk and was caught by the Soviet invasion of Poland. Together with numerous other "socially-dangerous elements", he was rounded up by NKVD and sent to a labor camp on the northern bank of the Onego Lake. He survived there by rare chances and was freed in 1945 as a former Polish citizen according to the agreement with Poland. In 1946, he was permitted to return to Poland, from where he moved to Palestine, where he immediately started writing his book, finished in 1947.
- "Until the autumn of 1939 I was 'favourably neutral' towards the USSR. It was the characteristic stand of progressive and radical intellectuals in Europe. In the last seven years I have become an inveterate and vehement enemy of the Soviet system." <Margolin>
It was impossible to publish such a book about the Soviet Union in the West at these times, immediately after the World War II. At the same time, the manuscript was also rejected by Israel establishment as well, because of not very positive portrayal of Jews. At long last, the book was printed in 1952 in the United States by Chekhov Publishing House (and reprinted in 1975).
"The land Ze-Ka is not mapped in the Soviet maps, there is no such land in atlases" <Margolin, 1947> This sounds amazingly similar to Gulag Archipelago, "almost invisible, almost untangible country populated by the tribe of 'zeks'" <Solzhenitsyn, 1956?>.
In 1951, Margolin was a witness in the trial of David Rousset against a French communist newspaper. The latter was engaged in slander of Rousset for his activities in revealing of Gulag to French public.
