The Hidden Russia: My Ten Years as a Slave Laborer

The Hidden Russia, first published in 1960, is a detailed recounting of the author's ten-years as a political prisoner inside the prisons and slave labor camps of the former Soviet Union. From the mock-trials and cells of the infamous Lubyanka, to the freezing boxcars and inhuman conditions, beatings and deprivations of the Siberian camps, Nikolai Krasnov paints a bleak picture of daily life in the Russian prison system established by the Communists. In the freezing mud huts of the Siberian Correctional Labor Camps Krasnov learned that hunger and brutality can reduce inmates as well as their slave masters to a common denominator of slovenly bestiality where "crime in the labor camps exceeds all dimensions." Even so, even under the most brutal conditions the literary eyes of the author were able to see some human decency. Whether jammed in the "icebox" freight car, tortured in a dreadful prison, or laboring animal-like in the muddy tundra there was for him always the memory of the love of his family. There persisted always his love of Russia. "The Russian people are strong and tough...they have survived more than one tempest...the future lies with the people not the government." Through his torture there yet gleams a poetic appreciation of Mother Russia. "Outside my window the spring sun was still smiling, the cloudless sky was like an inverted bowl of brilliant pale blue enamel. Cabbage butterflies fluttered by in pairs...