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A childhood in prison

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This is one of the great lost works of soviet literature. It was written by the son of a Soviet marshall purged by Stalin in 1937. His mother and father executed, the son was thrown into jail. Peter Yakir's first night as a prisoner was spent in a cell full of monks. He recalled their singing as very good, particularly their basses. Not a bad call for a 15 year old boy. What follows is a dispassionate account of a child's experience of Stalin's gulag. Yakir survived with his conscience intact, something he attributed to his education by political prisoners steeped in the humanist tradition. Yakir survived the Gulag and became a dissident, for which he spent most of the rest of his life in jails, and, more ominously, psychiatric hospitals, to which many dissidents were conigned. He went off my radar in 1975, after a show trial in which he was clearly affected by psychiatric drugs and rendered speechless. I have no knowledge of him after that. His book is a classic of prison literature and deserves a wide audience.