The Guards Spoke Russian

Aryeh Malkish, a Ukrainian Jew, was an engineering student in Ryazan when the KGB arrested him in 1969 for organizing a group of political dissidents. He was sent to the gulag for seven years, where Ukrainians accounted for nearly half of Russia's millions of political prisoners. Originally published in 1978, his trenchant memoir vividly describes life in a Soviet labor camp, where disfiguring pathologies flourished in an atmosphere of unrelenting suspicion and cruelty and intrenched antisemitism.