Journey into the Whirlwind

1937. The grinding gears of Stalinist repression run at full power. In just one year, the Bolsheviks executed more than three hundred thousand people—almost a thousand a day… Anyone could be declared an enemy of the people overnight: on a made-up charge, on slander, or an anonymous tip. That is exactly what happened to the correspondent of “Literary Gazette,” an education worker, a party member—Evgenia Ginzburg.

In that accursed Thirty-Seventh year, her usual life ended and began something completely different—full of humiliation and horrors, filled with only one feeling: a sense of astonishment. Could it be possible? Is it really serious? Evgenia Ginzburg was lucky. She survived. The devilish machine of the bloody Soviet regime failed to grind her up. By the time it happened, she was a little over thirty; when she was finally free, she was over fifty. And between these two dates lay a long eighteen years spent THERE.

Don’t miss the audio version of one of the most piercing autobiographical novels from the cult of personality era—“The Cruel Route.”