Ginzburg was an advocate of nonviolent change who sought to embarrass the Soviet authorities by pressing them to respect their own laws. He also sought to increase external pressure on the Soviet Union to show more respect for individual rights by smuggling out information about abuses to the West so that it could be broadcast back to the Soviet people by Western radio stations.

"He had been ill since he left prison, and he had cancer," Ginzburg's son, also named Alexander, said from the family's Paris apartment.

Ginzburg had attracted the attention of the Soviet authorities in 1959, with a typewritten magazine called Syntax, containing bitter poems that reflected his generation's anger and disillusionment with the Soviet Union. It became the first of the so-called samizdat journals of the post-Stalin period.

After three issues, Ginzburg was expelled from Moscow University, arrested by the KGB and put in Lubyanka prison.

In 1967, he was arrested again for compiling what he called a "White Book'' about the trial of the dissident writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky and smuggling it to the West. He was sentenced to five years in a labor camp.

In 1974, he agreed to administer a fund established by the exiled Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn to aid the families of political prisoners. He was also active in Helsinki Watch, an organization set up to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the human-rights commitments in the Helsinki accords, which it signed in 1975.

The upshot of Ginzburg's renewed dissident activities was another trial, in 1978, which resulted in an eight-year term.

But in 1979, under the growing pressure of world public opinion, Ginzburg, together with four other leading dissidents, was released to the West in exchange for two Soviet spies.

"He was the detonator of the democratic movement at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s," said Boris Zolotukhin, 72, who defended Ginzburg at his trial in 1968.

"His trial was closed and the outcome was, of course, known in advance. ... He held up very courageously throughout," added Zolotukhin, who was barred from practicing law for 20 years after defending Ginzburg.

In Paris, Ginzburg, known as "Alik" to friends, kept up pressure on post-Soviet Russia to improve its human rights record.

"Up until the final days of his life, Alik was one of the most active and responsive participants in Russia's human rights movement," said Yelena Bonner, the wife of Soviet dissident, human rights activist and physicist Andrei Sakharov.

"He ... had a superb sense of humor and irony, which he maintained in even the most difficult conditions - in prison, in the camps and when he was free," Bonner said by telephone from the United States.

Ginzburg's funeral was scheduled for Monday at the Russian memorial cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve des Bois, where many prominent Russians opposed to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution are buried, Ekho Moskvy radio and TVS television reported.

He is survived by his wife, Arina, and two sons.

- Reuters, NYT, AP