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

The human cost of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system in which millions of people were imprisoned between 1920 and 1956, was staggering. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others after him have written movingly about the Gulag, yet never has there been a thorough historical study of this unique and tragic episode in Soviet history. This groundbreaking book presents the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the camp system. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has mined the contents of extensive archives, including long-suppressed state and Communist Party documents, to uncover the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social policy.

A woman’s true account of eighteen years as a Soviet prisoner: “Not even Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich matches it.”—The New York Times Book Review 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. “Deeply significant…intensely personal and passionately felt.”—Time “Probably the best account that has ever been published of…the prison and camp empire of the Stalin era.”—Book World Translated by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward

A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.