Americans have never really appreciated the horrors visited upon the Soviet people by Lenin and completed by Stalin and Beria. Is twenty million dead an accurate number? How about thirty? The numbers are impossible for the mind to register. Dr. Bardach brings one of these experiences vividly into the reader's frame of references. I wondered several times during my reading, with an awful feeling of foreboding terror, whether it could ever happen here.
Dr. Bardack's book is more than simply shocking. I am perfectly convinced that the author, by simple use of understatement, refrained from amplifying his personal set of horrors. His use of contrasting descriptions of beautiful scenes while on route-beaches, forests, mountain steppes-forces us to carefully reassess how men of reason could generate such hostility.
This book is not light reading, yet it is difficult to put down. The writing style is excellent and is a pleasure-if one can describe terror as "pleasure." It is a forceful commentary, an unique historical document, and Dr. Bardach should be congratulated for his willingness to relive and present it to us.
Needless to say, I bought the book, and was not disappointed. As other reviewers have pointed out, this is one of those rare non-fiction pieces that reads like a novel: Indeed, it is the occassional recollection that you're reading a memoir that makes it especially gripping. The story was, of course, unbelievably touching in its harrowing and heroic qualities, and the mis-en-texte, facilitated by Ms. Gleeson, put it in a language that is both unpretentiously personal and deeply insightful.
Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in this tragic period of world history or merely in the human struggle to survive.
The writing and translation is absolutely impeccable. I felt like I personally experienced each of the author's highs and lows in the Gulag as they were related. This is a rare look inside the system that swallowed up so many of the best and brightest people.
It is too bad that Hollywood is so obsessed with the dozen or so screenwriters who lost their jobs in 1950's America to the anti-communist investigations because any one of the many films devoted to their plight would have been better served by profiling just a single member of the millions who perished in the Soviet Gulag.