"This is a history of the Gulag: a history of the vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs." (Introduction, p.Xv)

"From the very earliest days of the new Soviet state, in other words, people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were." (Chapter 1, p.6)

"On their first night in the camp, writes the memoirist and former prisoner Boris Shiryaev, he and other new arrivals were greeted by Comrade A. P. Nogtev, Solovetsky's first camp commander. 'I welcome you,' he told them, with what Shiryaev describes as 'irony': 'As you know, here...