True Stories

This book is yet another wonderful, though terribly sad collection of vignettes about the author and his life in the Gulag. His writing is beautiful, even poetic and forgiving at times, then angry and frustrated in other parts. His is an honest, straightforward memoir about an awful period in Russian's cold and cruel history. You will never forget the people you meet in this book, and Lev Razgon will amaze and inspire you.

Lev Razgon has not written just another account of train rides, hunger, and interrogations. Rather, in a series of vignettes, he explores the political culture both of the Soviet gulag and of the Stalinist era as a whole. While some of these can be precious, and all require a reasonable knowledge of Soviet history (better annotation would have been useful), Razgon provides one of the last first-hand accounts of the prison culture--on both sides of the wire--in the Soviet Union.