True stories - Lev Razgon

Lev Razgon is the last man alive to have attended and survived the Communist Party Congress of 1934. When the Stalinist terror began in 1937 he was living among the Party elite, a journalist whose family had a long history of falling foul of the authorities. He brilliantly evokes the everyday atmosphere of a Soviet world of privilege soon to be destroyed in a cataclysm in which his own life was to be torn apart.Arrested in 1938, Razgon spent the next eighteen years in labour camps or in exile in various provincial towns. His portraits of those who shared this inhumane life are telling and unusual in that the jailers and executioners feature as prominently as the victims. This, he explains, should not surprise us, for there were innumerable victims, and 'to shoot a million people requires a great many executioners'. Prisoners and jailers lived side by side for years on end and all, to Razgon, were human beings.Written with a novelist's skill and with a sophisticated understanding of his country and his century, True Stories caused a sensation when it first appeared in Russia in 1988. It has now been translated into all the major European languages and has been the subject of a Russian TV documentary.Razgon's reason for writing this memorable book is quite simple: 'When I first got out of the camps I was utterly happy for a few years... but there was always the terrible sense that I had survived when so many others had died... Ultimately I knew I had just one obligation - the obligation of the living to the dead.'