True Stories / Lev Razgon

Harrowing, inspiring and unforgettable, True Stories stands out among the literature of the Gulag both for its literary quality and for its informed insights from a long life spent among both pro- and anti - Soviet figures.

Lev Razgon is the last man alive to have attended and survived the Communist Party Congress of 1934.  When the Stalinist terror began in 1937 he was living among the Party elite, a journalist whose family had a long history of falling foul of the authorities.  He brilliantly evokes the everyday atmosphere of a Soviet world of privilege soon to be destroyed ina cataclysm in which his own life was to be torn apart.