The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags – Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia
By Tim Tzouliadis
Little Brown £20, 480 pages

When, in 1992, I travelled to the far northern Russian city of Vorkuta – established as the administration centre for a vast hinterland of labour camps – I met a young Polish diplomat. He was on a mission to unearth the files of the many thousands of Poles who had been imprisoned there. As we talked in a café, I noticed an old man hovering a little way away, clearly wanting to communicate but torn between eagerness and fear. Finally, he plunged towards my acquaintance, explained that he had heard his compatriot’s Polish accent, and that he had been a zek, or convict, and stayed on.