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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world... (more)
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Gulag
A History
by Anne Applebaum
The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its... (more)
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Journey into the Whirlwind
by Eugenia Semenovna Ginzburg, Paul Stevenson, Max Hayward
Both witness to and victim of Stalin’s reign of terror, a courageous woman tells the story of her harrowing eighteen-year odyssey through Russia’s prisons and labor camps. Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956
An Experiment in Literary Investigation
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression -- the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims -- men, women, and children -- we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the... (more)
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The First Circle
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
*Starred Review* Even the title was truncated when The First Circle, an expurgated English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet-censored masterpiece In the First Circle, was published to acclaim in the West in 1968. Written in the mid-1950s just after Solzhenitsyn’s eight years in the gulag, his nearly fatal bout with cancer, and his sentence to “perpetual” exile in Kazakhstan, this novel of tyranny and... (more)
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Everything Flows
by Vasily Grossman
A New York Review Books Original Everything Flows is the last novel by Vasily Grossman, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his extraordinary epic of besieged Stalingrad, and the besieged modern soul, Life and Fate . The central story is simple yet moving: Ivan Grigoryevich, the hero, is released after thirty years in the Soviet camps and has to struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar... (more)
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Aquariums of Pyongyang
Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag
by Kang Chol-hwan, Pierre Rigoulot
North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these... (more)
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Within the Whirlwind
by Eugenia Semenovna Ginzburg
This book continues the narrative of Ginzburg's nightmarish eighteen-year survival of Soviet prisons and labor camps, following the Stalinist purges of 1937. Introduction by Heinrich Böll. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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Koba the Dread
Laughter and the Twenty Million
by Martin Amis
A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience . Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought:... (more)
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The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
by Adam Hochschild
Although some twenty million people died during Stalin"s reign of terror, only with the advent of glasnost did Russians begin to confront their memories of that time. In 1991, Adam Hochschild spent nearly six months in Russia talking to gulag survivors, retired concentration camp guards, and countless others. The result is a riveting evocation of a country still haunted by the ghost of Stalin.
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Kolyma Tales (Twentieth-Century Classics)
by Varlam Shalamov, John Glad
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously... (more)
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House of Meetings
by Martin Amis
An extraordinary novel that ratifies Martin Amis’s standing as “a force unto himself,” as The Washington Post has attested: “There is, quite simply, no one else like him.” House of Meetings is a love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape. In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the... (more)
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The Stalin Epigram: A Novel
by Robert Littell
Based on a riveting historical episode, The Stalin Epigram is a fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century -- and one of the few artists in Soviet Russia who daringly refused to pay creative homage to Joseph Stalin. The poet's defiance of the Kremlin dictator and the Bolshevik regime -- particularly his outspoken criticism of Stalin's... (more)
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Man Is Wolf to Man
by Janusz Bardach
'An exceptionally moving, inspiring and terrifying testament' Martin Amis: An inspiring, heroic account of one man's struggle to survive the brutalities of the Russian gulag; When Janusz Bardach, a young Polish Jew, fled the Nazis to join the Red Army, he found himself enmeshed instead in the dangerous, paranoid world of Stalinist Russia. Falling foul of the regime, he was sent to Kolyma, the harshest of all the... (more)
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Everyday Stalinism
Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Here is a pioneering account of everyday life under Stalin, written by a leading authority on modern Russian history. Focusing on the urban population, Fitzpatrick shows how living conditions and day-to-day practices changed dramatically with "Stalin's Revolution" at the beginning of the 1930s. With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all other consumer goods became endemic. As... (more)
A World ApartGustav Herling
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A World Apart
by Gustav Herling
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Long Road Home
Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor
by Yong Kim
Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp& mdash;a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former... (more)
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The Gulag Archipelago: Book 1
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume I
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
<This is the Audiobook CD Library Edition of VOLUME 1 in vinyl case.> **Time Magazine's Best Nonfiction Book of the 20th Century** In this masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn has orchestrated thousands of incidents and individual histories into one narrative of unflagging power and momentum. Written in a tone that encompasses Olympian wrath, bitter calm, savage irony, and sheer comedy, it combines history,... (more)
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Darkness At Noon
Tomorrow You Go Home: One Man's Harrowing Imprisonment in a Modern-Day Russian G
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Tomorrow You Go Home: One Man's Harrowing Imprisonment in a Modern-Day Russian G