In this volume, the powerful voices of Gulag survivors become accessible
to English-speaking audiences for the first time through oral histories,
rather than written memoirs. It brings together interviews with men and
women, members of the working class and intelligentsia, people who live
in the major cities and those from the "provinces," and from an array of
corrective hard labor camps and prisons across the former Soviet Union.
Its aims are threefold: 1) to give a sense of the range of the Gulag
experience and its consequences for Russian society; 2) to make the
Gulag relevant to English-speaking readers by offering comparisons to
historical catastrophes they are likely to know more about, such as the
Holocaust; and 3) to discuss issues of oral history and memory in the
cultural context of Soviet and post-Soviet society.