From Publishers Weekly
Written with calm courage in a matter-of-fact style, this searing diary is one of the fullest, most shocking accounts yet of the Soviet prison-camp system. Rewarded for his work as a communist in his native Austria and in Yugoslavia, Stajner was sent to the U.S.S.R. to run a print shop in 1932. Four years later, the victim of a Stalinist purge, he was sentenced to an initial 10 years in Siberian prisons, then to another 10. His journal recreates the regimentation, irrationality, thought control and sadism of the Gulag system. The reader learns of nuns murdered by NKVD soldiers, harems of women prisoners, executions committed in assembly line fashion, the mass slaughter that accompanied Soviet collectivization of farming. Now living in Yugoslavia, Stajner believes his ordeal was the fault of Stalinism and not of true socialism. His remarkable firsthand account stands as a condemnation of an unfree society.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Though Stalinist terror has been graphically described before, few accounts are as horrifying as Stajner's. An Austrian Slav, Stajner emigrated to Russia in the early 1930s to help build the socialist paradise. Like most foreigners of that era, he was soon arrested on false charges and sentenced to the Gulag. For more than 20 years Stajner lived in a frozen hell, with each day bringing nothing but hunger, cruelty, and death to friends and loved ones. Far from polemical, his account is told in a frightening monotone that serves to emphasize the pervasive suffering of Stalinist tyranny. Though painful to read, this very moving account should be widely read. Joseph W. Constance, Jr., Boston Coll. Lib.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
