During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, author Paul R. Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of five women from different social strata and regions in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state. The book begins with a synopsis of Stalin’s rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the 20th century.

Until now, there has been little scholarly analysis of the Soviet Gulag as an economic, social, and political institution, primarily owing to a lack of data. This collection presents the results of years of research by Western and Russian scholars. The authors provide both broad overviews and specific case studies.

The freelance writer and poet takes an unprecedented look inside the secret and repressive world of U.S. immigration prisons.

This book brings together for the first time a collection of essays by western scholars about women in the Stalin era (1928-53). It explores both the realities of women's lived experience in the 1930s and 1940s, and the various forms in which womanhood and femininity were represented and constructed in these decades. Women in the Stalin Era challenges the scholarly neglect women's history has suffered at the hands, and pens, of Russian and western historians of the Stalin period.

The second edition of Hidden Gulag utilizes the testimony of sixty former North Koreans who were severely and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in a vast network of penal and forced labor institutions in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for reasons not permitted by international law. By the time of the research for the second edition in 2010 and 2011, there were some 23,000 former North Koreans who recently arrived in South Korea. Included in this number are hundreds of persons formerly detained in the variety of North Korea's slave labor camps, penitentiaries, and detention facilities. Included in this number are several former prisoners who were arbitrarily imprisoned for twenty to thirty years before their escape or release from the labor camps, and their subsequent flight through China to South Korea. This newly available testimony dramatically increases our knowledge of the operation of North Korea's political prison and labor camp system. This second edition of Hidden Gulag also utilizes a recent international legal framework for the analysis of North Korea's human rights violations: the norms and standards established in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court for defining and determining crimes against humanity, which became operative in July 2002. In addition to the testimony and accounts from the former political prisoners in this report, this second edition of Hidden Gulag also includes satellite photographs of the prison camps.