«This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is the most documented study of the evolution of the Soviet repressive system of the Main Directorate of Camps, from its creation shortly after 1917 to its dismantling in 1986. Inseparable from the country’s history, the Gulag was not only an instrument of punishment for criminal offences and mass terror against real and imagined opponents of the regime, but also a significant factor in the economic growth of the USSR. Only during its heyday — in 1929−1959 — about 18 million prisoners passed through thousands of camps. In the author’s collected written and oral memoirs of the perished and the survivors of concentration camps, and in the documents of archives — unique evidence of daily life and mores of the jail: the camp hierarchy, national and social specifics of relations between prisoners, the horror of slave labour, hunger and humiliation, the price of life and death, dignity and villainy, despair and hope, enmity and love …
This true story of the web of Great Terror is one of the most tragic pages in the annals of the 20th century, which unfortunately, in author’s opinion, has not become part of public knowledge.»