Boris Galin was born in 1904 in Nikopol (near Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine), in a Jewish family. His father Abram appears to have been a shochet (Jewish ritual slaughterer), and in the late 1930s he took part in setting up an illegal cheder and yeshiva in Dnepropetrovsk. He was also an associate of Levi Yitzchak Schneerson (father of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson). In 1938, Abram was arrested and convicted of "anti-Soviet and clerical propaganda," along with several other Jewish religious activists.
Boris was fond of literature from an early age, and he began to publish his own essays in 1925. As a youth, he went to Moscow and found a job as a typographer in a printing house. There, he was seriously wounded, and the subsequent disability disqualified him from serving in the Red Army. In 1927, he enrolled in the Ethnological Department of Moscow University, which he attended for two years, until 1929. In 1930-1933, he continued his education at the Literature Department of the Institute of Red Professors. In 1930, he began to work for the central Soviet newspaper, Pravda – first as a special correspondent, and later as a staff journalist. In his dispatches, he described the life and labor of the workers and "builders of socialism." In 1932, the renowned Soviet writer Maxim Gorky referred to Galin as “the most talented of the writers-essayists.” The year 1930 saw the publication of Galin's first book, a collection of essays titled The Transition (“Perekhod”). It was followed by several other titles: The Trial (“Ispytanie”), God of War (“Bog Voiny”), etc. In 1933, he and Yakov Ilyin co-authored a book titled The People of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant (“Ludi STZ”), which was extensively covered in the media and discussed by the public.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Galin began to work as a war correspondent for the central military newspaper, The Red Star. He remained in the rank of private until the end of the war, since his injury exempted him from formal military service. Despite being initially ignorant of the rules and regulations of the Red Army, he quickly gained extensive war experience. He always worked in the combat zone, on the frontlines of the Western, Southern, and 1st Belorussian Fronts. His primary focus was on the stories of individual soldiers, their inner lives and psychological portraits (e.g., the essays “Arshintsev” and “Farewell, the 109th”). His wartime contributions were not mere journalistic pieces, but actual literary works.
In 1943, Galin was awarded the Order of the Red Star. The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, David Ortenberg, would recall one of Galin’s correspondences, sent from the recently liberated Krasnodar (a city in southern Russia). It contained information about the gas vans (Gaswagen, mobile gas chambers), which the Nazis had actively used to exterminate the civilian population of that region, including its Jews. This report was not published in the newspaper, probably because of the increasing antisemitism among the Party bureaucracy.
After the end of the war, Boris Galin continued to work as a journalist and writer. In 1946, he co-wrote the script for the movie Our Heart with Evgeniy Gabrilovich, a fellow journalist. Galin published many books of essays, and in 1948 he was awarded the Stalin Prize in literature for two of them (In the Donbass and In a Certain Locality). Galin also wrote a book of memoirs titled The Time Is Distant – The Comrades Are Close (“Время далекое - товарищи близкие,” 1970), where he described a circle of poets and writers that had been active in Moscow in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Boris Galin died in Moscow in 1983.
