The New York Times Book Review, Paul Goldberg
The book is an oral history. The size of each chapter seems to be determined by the amount of material a group of Mr. Razgon's friends was able to absorb during a long evening. Chapters are organized around broad themes, like fear or jailers, a structure that lets the author meander at will between his arrest in 1938 and his release in 1955.

From Kirkus Reviews
An unforgettable memoir of a journalist who survived two incarcerations in the Gulag, filled with his memories of the victims, the executioners, and those who connived with Stalin's genocidal plans. Razgon, born in 1908, a writer and editor connected by marriage to top Stalinist officials, was a Communist who was caught up in the purges of the late 1930s and was finally released only after the Khrushchev reforms of the 1950s. He records the life of the elite both before the purges--he is the last person alive to have attended the Congress of the Communist Party in 1934--and what happened to them afterwards. Most memorable are his vivid portraits of those with whom he came into contact: Roshchakovsky, an aristocratic ‚migr‚ who had returned to serve the Soviet navy and ``would eat the prison soup with the wooden spoons so beautifully that it was impossible to tear your eyes away''; Boris and Gleb, ages 16 and 18 respectively, who returned from Czechoslovakia to help the Soviet Union, only to find themselves transported to the Gulag; Zaliva, a bluff and honest camp commandant who killed 1,500 people in the course of a single winter by insisting on following his instructions to the letter; and Colonel Tarasyuk, with the profile of a Roman senator, who calmly gave instructions on one occasion that ensured that everyone in his hospital would be dead within a month. Razgon notes that, according to a Ministry of State Security report in 1956, between 1935 and 1941 alone seven million people were shot--a million a year. During Alexander II's reign, by contrast, just over 60 political prisoners were hanged in Russia. But the author's thoughts ultimately turn not just to the victims or their families, but to the tens of thousands who participated in the process of execution and are now living quiet lives somewhere in Russia. A brilliant memoir, by turns harrowing, inspiring, sardonic, and devastating. (20 photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Lev Razgon became famous overnight when his memoirs first appeared in Russia in 1988. They were a sensation both due to his angle of vision - Razgon was living among the Party elites as the Stalinist terror of 1937 began - as well as to his sophisticated understanding of both his country and his century. His remarkably long life took him from the shtetl and a family which had been unlucky with the authorities for many generations, to Moscow where he was a Communist journalist and writer, to 17 years in labor camps (a fate shared by both his wives). When he finally returned to Moscow for good, he went back to writing books for young adults and worked in secret on these memoirs. The last man alive to have actually attended and survived the Communist Party Congress of 1934 - most of those attending were dead within three years - Razgon brilliantly conveys the everyday atmosphere of a Soviet world of privilege about to be destroyed. Stalin had given secret orders that the families and friends of the powerful be decimated as a lesson in terror, a preemptive strike against any thoughts of a coup. In this book the personalities and stories which shaped Razgon's existence before and after his seventeen years in the camps are emphasized. Razgon's journalistic curiosity and interest in history as well as individuals led him in unusual directions. Much here is new: the characters and fates of the jailers; the camp lives of the wives of the Soviet elite, imprisoned as hostages to control their powerful husbands; and the frustration of formerly high-ranking military men, forgotten prisoners of the gulag as they see that World War II is approaching.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This remarkable book is a testament to the epochal transformation of the former Soviet Union and the obligation to remember its Stalinist past. Razgon (b. 1908), a journalist married to the daughter of a high-ranking Soviet official, was arrested during the Stalinist terror in 1938 and lived in labor camps or internal exile until 1956, when he was rehabilitated. With the onset of perestroika, he began to publish the memoirs he had been secretly writing for two decades. If Razgon's work lacks the sweep of Solzhenitsyn's gulag accounts, it is full of wisdom and vivid character sketches of victims and perpetrators alike, such as camp boss Tarasyuk, who "resembled in some ways the slaveowners of classical times." In relating these episodes, Razgon reminds us of the insanity of Stalinist legality, which imprisoned the wives of top officials such as President Kalinin and Foreign Minister Molotov while their husbands kept their posts. A one-time Communist Party member, Razgon ultimately resigned and became a founder of Memorial, a group that reexamines the country's history. A wrenching epilogue describes his encounter with his own recently opened KGB file. Crowfoot's translation makes this substantial set of stories accessible. Photos not seen by PW. (June)

Kirkus Reviews

An unforgettable memoir of a journalist who survived two incarcerations in the Gulag, filled with his memories of the victims, the executioners, and those who connived with Stalin's genocidal plans.

Razgon, born in 1908, a writer and editor connected by marriage to top Stalinist officials, was a Communist who was caught up in the purges of the late 1930s and was finally released only after the Khrushchev reforms of the 1950s. He records the life of the elite both before the purges—he is the last person alive to have attended the Congress of the Communist Party in 1934—and what happened to them afterwards. Most memorable are his vivid portraits of those with whom he came into contact: Roshchakovsky, an aristocratic émigré who had returned to serve the Soviet navy and "would eat the prison soup with the wooden spoons so beautifully that it was impossible to tear your eyes away"; Boris and Gleb, ages 16 and 18 respectively, who returned from Czechoslovakia to help the Soviet Union, only to find themselves transported to the Gulag; Zaliva, a bluff and honest camp commandant who killed 1,500 people in the course of a single winter by insisting on following his instructions to the letter; and Colonel Tarasyuk, with the profile of a Roman senator, who calmly gave instructions on one occasion that ensured that everyone in his hospital would be dead within a month. Razgon notes that, according to a Ministry of State Security report in 1956, between 1935 and 1941 alone seven million people were shot—a million a year. During Alexander II's reign, by contrast, just over 60 political prisoners were hanged in Russia. But the author's thoughts ultimately turn not just to the victims or their families, but to the tens of thousands who participated in the process of execution and are now living quiet lives somewhere in Russia.

A brilliant memoir, by turns harrowing, inspiring, sardonic, and devastating.