This is the harrowing autobiography of Russian university professor and Communist party member Eugenia Ginzburg, after she was wrongly convicted of taking part in a Trotskyist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin’s reign of terror. Ginzburg served an 18-year sentence in the Gulag camps and Soviet prisons, often in solitary confinement and always in appalling, Holocaust-esque conditions.
Ginzburg was arrested in 1937, and spent the first part of her sentence at Blake Lake, where she shared a cell with another “political criminal” and was interrogated ruthlessly. Luckily, her incarceration at Blake Lake ended just weeks before torture was allowed to be used in questioning prisoners. Still, her time there was almost unendurable: she was severely malnourished, constantly ill, never saw or spoke to anyone besides her cellmate and the guards, and experienced serious insomnia and attacks of malaria.
After hearing mysterious rhythmic tapping on the walls for many weeks, Ginzburg and her cellmate managed to figure out the code the other prisoners had constructed as a means of communication. This would prove invaluable, as it turned out to be a code used all across Stalin’s prison network by inmates in solitary confinement.
After being deported from prison to prison, Ginzburg eventually served the final years of her sentence (before her re-accusation, anyway, which is described in the sequel of this book) in slave-labour-camps including the infamous Magadan and Kolyma camps. There she was forced to fell wood for hours daily in the freezing Siberian cold, severely malnourished and ravaged with illness. Some estimates of the Kolyma death-toll reach over a million people; Ginzburg was one of comparatively few to survive this Soviet hellhole.
This was an expertly written book, truly thought-provoking and a fascinating insight into one of the worst atrocities of all history.