Taiga

Life and Death in Stalin's Camps; Tales from the Hell of the Gulag Sergei Maximov's volume of short stories »Taiga« brings together 23 stories about life in the Gulag under Stalin. They tell of the tragic arrest, the interrogations in the Lubyanka, the forced betrayal by friends, the horror of the transport to the camps, the murderous conditions and the difficulty of the work there. Maximov repeatedly shows how people become animals under the extremes of the Gulag, prisoners, overseers, but also so-called »intellectuals« examining magistrates, camp managers...But, the author also, lets us through and shows the humanity that prevails among political prisoners how to overcome their fear, not to give up and try to preserve their dignity. Forced labor, hunger, cold, illness.