The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin

Stalin’s Reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called “the other holocaust.” During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women, and children perished than in Hitler’s destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin’s Gulag of torture prisons and forced labor camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953.

 

This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned author and historian Stephen F. Cohen, who came to know many former Gulag inmates during his frequent trips to Moscow over a period of 30 years. Based on first-hand interviews with the victims themselves and on newly available materials, Cohen provides a powerful narrative of the survivors’ post-Gulag saga, from their liberation and return to Soviet society, to their long struggle to salvage what remained of their shattered lives and to obtain justice; showing that the struggle between anti-Stalinists and Stalinists is still under way in Russia today.