About the Author

By the late 1930s, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg (1896-1977) had been a loyal and very active member of the Communist Party for many years. Yet like the millions of others who suffered during Stalin's reign of terror, she was arrested (on trumped-up charges of being a Trotskyist terrorist counter-revolutionary) and sentenced to prison. With an amazing eye for detail and profound strength and an indefatigable spirit, Ginzburg recounts the years, days, and minutes she endured in prisons and labor camps, including two years of solitary confinement.