From the Editor

The title, Inside Stalin’s Gulag, pricked my interest, and I dipped into the book. It was enough. I took it home and read it in one sitting.

Its author, Kazimierz Zarod, a young civil servant in pre-war Poland, was captured when his department left Warsaw to escape the German invasion and ran instead into the Red Army invading from the East. He spent a nightmarish 18 months in two Soviet labor camps, surviving brutal interrogations, starvation rations, Stakhanovite work norms, severe illness, all the horrors of utopia, but also witnessing courage, ingenuity, and altruism in his cold hell.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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The title, Inside Stalin’s Gulag, pricked my interest, and I dipped into the book. It was enough. I took it home and read it in one sitting.

Its author, Kazimierz Zarod, a young civil servant in pre-war Poland, was captured when his department left Warsaw to escape the German invasion and ran instead into the Red Army invading from the East. He spent a nightmarish 18 months in two Soviet labor camps, surviving brutal interrogations, starvation rations, Stakhanovite work norms, severe illness, all the horrors of utopia, but also witnessing courage, ingenuity, and altruism in his cold hell.