The book “The Ring of Satan” consists of two parts: the first, “Beyond Mountains, Beyond Valleys,” tells about the Kolyma camps of the 30s–40s; the second, “The Persecuted,” tells about the author’s life in Kolyma after his release—and again, about the camps.
The hero of the novel is Sergei Morozov—Vyacheslav Ivanovich Palman. Who he was, how he lived and worked in Kolyma, the reader will learn from this book. Not only about him, but about dozens of fates like his—illegally repressed during the years of Stalin’s terror and diligently learning to survive in the vast expanses of Kolyma. Not only those who worked, but also those who truly became friends despite the hard labor; those who loved with an inexplicably pure love and believed in the bright future of the Motherland…
“The Ring of Satan” was published in the form in which the author had secretly written it back in the 70s–80s, without any changes or additions from the publisher.
In the second part, “The Persecuted,” Vyacheslav Ivanovich tells how he worked on a free hire basis in the Western Mining Administration (now the Susuman district), in particular on the “Susuman” state farm, which ceased to exist in the mid-90s of the last century. How he освоював—together with fellow sufferers—Kolyma’s land where they grew cabbage, potatoes, and greens, and in the greenhouses grew tomatoes and cucumbers.
In the book “The Persecuted,” the arrival in Kolyma is described, including the visit to the “Susuman” state farm in 1944 by a delegation of the United States of America headed by the U.S. vice president Henry Wallace. The reader will be especially interested in the moment when the former prisoner Sergei Morozov became, for a day, the main person at the state-farm camp, and his subordinates for that time were captains and majors, their wives, and all the free residents who worked at the state farm.
The leadership of Dalstroy presented Henry Wallace the agronomist of the state farm Sergei Morozov as a major Kolyma farmer…