This book documents a journey across the former USSR in the winter of 1991, during the glasnost era, when the author, accompanied by a writer and translator, interviewed survivors of Stalin’s Gulag prison camps. Between 1930 and 1953, an estimated 18 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag system, with over 1.5 million perishing. Decades later, in response to the resurgence of authoritarianism under Putin and renewed suppression of dissent, the author revisited the topic using digital archives and collaborated with Memorial, a now-banned organization committed to preserving the history of the Gulag and its victims.
