the Gulag
The clear and present danger of exploring the Gulag
When his plan to ski hundreds of miles up the frozen River Lena fails, Charlie Walker grows increasingly alarmed by his hostile reception in Siberia
The awful calamity of Stalin being a music lover
The dictator obsessed over new recordings and was a frequent visitor to the Bolshoi; but he treated even the greatest musicians arbitrarily, consigning many to the Gulag for no reason
Imprisoned for years on Putin’s whim
Vladimir Pereverzin’s ‘crime’ was to have worked for a company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky – and refusing to give false evidence resulted in an 11-year sentence in the camps
Journeys out of hell
In a profoundly moving family memoir, Daniel Finkelstein describes the miracle by which his mother, as a child, was rescued from the hell of Belsen
Autocrat and autodidact
The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it…
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature
‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag…
No use crying over spilt blood
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the…
