7000 Days in the GULAG

Before you are the memoirs of Austrian Karl Steiner, who spent 20 years on the islands of the GULAG archipelago Butyrka, Lefortovo, Alexandrovsky Central, Solovki, Norillag, and Ozerlag. He began serving his sentence with the sister of Heinrich Yagoda and finished with relatives of Lavrentiy Beria, experiencing all the horrors of repression and political violence. In the prisons of the NKVD, in the icy deserts of the Far North, everywhere my suffering exceeded human measure and the limit of patience, I carried within me a single desire – to endure all this and tell the whole world and, first of all, my party comrades and friends, how we survived these horrors… I rarely embarked on analysis and commentary of events. I primarily wanted to describe the bare facts. And let the reader judge for themselves.