Till My Tale Is Told Womens Memoirs of the Gulag [Paperback]

How extraordinary it is that compassion and tenderness may flourish in the cruellest conditions; how stubbornly and bravely people survive them. This is not a depressing book but an inspiriting and encouraging one. Doris Lessing

The sixteen life stories are riveting.... testimony to the complexity of the human spirit[,] to miracles of survival and endurance in the most hellish of conditions.... Till My Tale Is Told remind[s] us of the importance of remembrance and testimony about this particularly brutal chapter of human history. The Women's Review of Books

... probably the most gripping and detailed addition to the famous fundamental work by Solzhenitsyn. This book should be read by everybody... The Spectator

... a fascinating, brave and in many ways heartening book...
Times Literary Supplement

A moving and powerful human and historical document. The emotional and moral strength of these women who lost many years of their lives to the organized cruelties of the Gulag, and who, as they say, represent the many who did not return, is an unforgettable lesson for our time. Robert Conquest

Arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial and sentencing, transport, labor camps, internal exile, sometimes release, often followed by re-arrest and re-imprisonmentand, for those who outlived Stalin, eventual reprieve and rehabilitationthese are the outlines of the experiences recorded by 16 Russian women whose moving testimonies, most of them written in secret and at great personal risk, are presented here. Besides their value as historical documentation, these memoirs testify to the decency and compassion of their authors, maintained in resistance to a cruel and dehumanizing system.

The following summary of one of the memoirs, from a review of the Russian edition in the Times Literary Supplement, gives a sense of the power and poignancy of these intensely human eye-witness accounts:

Olga Adamova[-Sliozberg] was arreste