Condemned to the Truth

“Condemned to the Truth” is an action-packed novella about the work of law-enforcement agencies: about the Soviet mafia, about incompetence and honor, about baseness and duty.

Igor Nikolaevich Gamaünov was born in May 1940 in the Zavolzhye village of Piterka in the Saratov region, into a teacher’s family.

In 1956 he went to Kazakhstan by Komsomol call to help raise virgin lands. He graduated from the journalism faculty of Moscow State University, served as a special correspondent for “Pionerskaya Pravda” and “Sovetskaya Rossiya,” and headed a department at the journal “Molodoy Kommunist.”

Since 1980 he has worked at “Literaturnaya Gazeta”—first as head of the department of morals and law, then as chief editor of the “Society” department, and as an “LG” columnist. Author of many court essays. One of them—about falsifiers of criminal cases—became the basis for the feature film “The Killer’s Place Is Vacant.” The result of a critical publication (in January ’90) about official arbitrariness in the Volgograd region was TV-shown rallies of Volgograd residents who took to the streets with placards (quotes from I. Gamaünov’s article), followed by the scandalous removal of the First Secretary of the CPSU regional committee.