Evgeniia Ginzburg was born in Moscow in 1904. Her parents were Solomon Natanovich Ginzburg (1876-1938), a pharmacist, and Revekka Markovna Ginzburg (1881-1949). In 1909 the family moved to Kazan where she spent her childhood and youth. She attended Kazan University and married Dmitri Fedorov, with whom she had a son, Alexei, born in 1926. She taught history and worked as a Communist Party activist. She also headed the culture department at the Kazan newspaper Krasnaia Tatariia. In 1930 she married Pavel Aksenov (1899-1991), a high-ranking party official, and in 1932 gave birth to her second son, Vasilii. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov and the beginning of the great purges, Evgeniia Ginzburg, like many of her communist colleagues, was accused of participating in counterrevolutionary and Trotskyist activity. Because of her association with N. N. Elvov and her role in editing Red Tartary, she was arrested on February 15,1937.

Ginzburg's case came to trial on August 1, 1937, and she was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in solitary confinement with loss of civil rights for five years afterward. She began her sentence in the women's prison in Iaroslavl, but after two years, she was sent to the labor camps of Kolyma in the Far East, where she worked in Elgen, Izvestkovaia, and other notorious sites. Anton Valter (1899-1959), a doctor of German heritage, who had been deported to Kolyma in 1935 for counterrevolutionary activity and who had been re-sentenced several times, helped Ginzburg obtain a nursing assignment in the labor camps. Ginzburg and Valter, a devout Catholic, eventually married. In February of 1949 Ginzburg was released from the Gulag system, but she was re-arrested in October and sentenced to permanent exile. It was only after Stalin's death that she and Valter were allowed to leave Magadan. In 1958 they settled in Lvov. After Valter's death in 1959 and after rehabilitation, Ginzburg was permitted to move to Moscow. She published various pieces in the monthly magazine IUnost, but her masterpiece, her memoir about life in the camps, Krutoi Marshrut, was rejected for publication. In the USSR it circulated in samizdat and then in 1967 was first published abroad by Mondadori in Italy and by Possev in Germany, and since that time has been translated into many other languages. Ginzburg died in Moscow in 1977.

Antonina Pavlovna Axenova was born with the surname of Khenchinskaia in Kolyma in 1946. At the age of three she was adopted by Evgeniia Ginzburg in Magadan. With the rehabilitation of her parents, she moved to Lvov and then to Moscow, where in 1971 she graduated from the Gosudarstvennyi Institut Teatralnovo Iskusstva imeni A. V. Lunacharskogo. She began her theatrical work in Krasnoiarsk in the Krasnoiarskii teatr iunogo zritelia imeni Leninskogo Komsomola, working with such directors as Kama Ginkas and performing in a variety of plays from an adaptation of Ray Bradbury to Moliere and Shakespeare. In 1972 she was admitted to the Leningradskii Gosudarstvennyi Akademicheskii Teatr Komedii, where she performed in such plays as Monologue about Marriage and The Misanthrope and worked with such directors as Petr Fomenko. Axenova also pursued a film career, starring in such movies as Ia sluzhu na granitse produced by Lenfilm in 1974. In 1978 she married Valerii Raevskii (1939-2011), who at the time was the principal director of the Belorussian National Theatre. She joined Raevskii in Minsk where she performed in the Russian theatre (imeni M. Gorkogo) as well as the Alternativnyi Teatr. In 1983 Axenova was expelled from the theatre when her brother, the novelist Vasilii Pavlovich Aksenov (1932-2008), left the Soviet Union and then was stripped of his citizenship. By 1986, however, the political situation had changed, and she was able to resume her career. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, she traveled to the US, and after living there for five years, she moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where she now resides and directs the Russian children's theatre.