Lev Razgon has not written just another account of train rides, hunger, and interrogations. Rather, in a series of vignettes, he explores the political culture both of the Soviet gulag and of the Stalinist era as a whole. While some of these can be precious, and all require a reasonable knowledge of Soviet history (better annotation would have been useful), Razgon provides one of the last first-hand accounts of the prison culture--on both sides of the wire--in the Soviet Union.