Early life Voinovich was born in
Stalinabad,
Tajik SSR,
Soviet Union. According to himself, his father was of Serbian descent and a translator of
Serbian literature, and his mother was of Jewish descent. Vladimir Voinovich claimed that his father belonged to the Serbian
Vojnović noble family, although this is solely based on his surname and the book by the Yugoslavian writer Vidak Vujnovic
Vojinovici i Vujinovici od srednjeg veka do danas (1985) which he received as a gift from the author during his stay in Germany. In 1936 Voinovich's father was arrested on the allegation of
anti-Soviet agitation and spent five years in
labor camps. According to his autobiography, he spent some time in Kazakhstan, "seeking inspiration", and on his return to Moscow started working on his first novel.
Literary debut and dissidence His earliest published books were
We Live Here and
I Want To Be Honest. In 1969 he published the first part of
The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, a satirical novel about a Russian soldier during
World War II. A second part was published in 1971. and in the West. In 1974, the authorities began a systematic harassment of Voinovich due to his writing and his political attitude. His telephone line was cut off in 1976. He and his family were forced to emigrate in 1980, being stripped of his citizenship.
Public activism in Russia Voinovich continued to voice his political convictions also after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2001 Voinovich signed an open letter expressing support to the
NTV channel, and in 2003 a letter against the
Second Chechen War. On 25 February 2015 he published an "Open Letter from Vladimir Voinovich to the President of Russia" in which he asked Putin to release the Ukrainian pilot
Nadiya Savchenko who went on a hunger strike. He stated that her death might have an even greater effect on the world's opinion than the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. In a 2015 interview with
The Daily Beast, Voinovich said that "In some ways, it is worse today" than during the Soviet era and that "the freedoms we have are just leftovers." In an interview with
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2017, Voinovich also voiced criticism of President Putin, saying that Putin had turned the country in a more conservative direction at the expense of politics "oriented toward the future." He repeated his opinion that the political situation in Russia today is comparable to the 1970s in the Soviet Union. "They are breaking up demonstrations. They are throwing people in prison on basically the same charges. True, they aren't giving seven-year sentences, but rather two. And now they have begun driving people out of the country", he noted. His second wife was Irina Danilovna Braude (1938—2004). They had one daughter Olga Voinovich (born 1973), a German writer. Following Irina's death in 2004 Voinovich married Svetlana Yakovlevna Kolesnichenko (née Lianozova), an entrepreneur, also a widow of the Russian journalist Tomas Kolesnichenko. They lived in Moscow. He was a member of the board of trustees of the
Vera hospice. Vladimir Voinovich died on the night of 27 July 2018 of a
heart attack. ==Work==