Mariner Books, 2002. — 425 p.
In the late 1930s, Eugenia Ginzburg was a wife and mother, a schoolteacher and writer, and a longtime loyal Communist Party member. But like millions of others during Stalin’s reign of terror, she was arrested—on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary—and sentenced to prison. With sharp detail and an indefatigable spirit, Ginzburg recounts her arrest and the eighteen harrowing years she endured in Soviet prisons and labor camps, including two in solitary confinement. Her memoir is “a compelling personal narrative of survival” (The New York Times Book Review)—and one of the most important documents of Stalin’s brutal regime.