True Stories

This gripping memoir portrays the Stalinist terror of 1937 through the eyes of journalist Lev Razgon, who endured two incarcerations in the Gulag and wrote this account upon his release seventeen years later.

His anecdotes reveal a previously unseen side of the imprisoned Soviet elite, their daily lives in the labor camps, and the true characters of their jailers. Razgon so vividly shares these horrific memories due to a "terrible sense that I had survived when so many others had died . . . Ultimately I knew I had just one obligation — the obligation of the living to the dead."

Lev Razgon (1908-1999) was a Communist who got caught up in the purges of the late 1930s. He was released in the 1950s, and his memoirs were first published in Russia in 1988.

John Crowfoot was closely involved with the Russian Booker Prize for ten years, and he has edited and translated several books about Soviet history and contemporary Russia.