Kolyma Tales

“Of all the books of the Gulag, the one that struck me the most is this because it is just so brutally matter of fact. It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in Russia’s polar northeast, and Shalamov himself spent 17 years there. This is not an overtly literary description of his experiences: it is written with such clarity and coldness that the brutality and the dehumanisation of the Gulag is palpable.” Read more...

The best books on Race and Slavery

David Olusoga, Historian