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Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Shalamov Biography

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“For many months there day and night, at the morning and the evening checks, innumerable execution orders were read out. In a temperature of fifty below zero [Fahrenheit] the musicians from among the non-political offenders played a flourish before and after each order was read. The smoking gasoline torches ripped apart the darkness…. The thin sheet on which the order was written was covered with hoarfrost, and some chief or other who was reading the order would brush the snowflakes from it with his sleeve so as to decipher and shout out the name of the next man on the list of those shot.”

Soviet RussiaGulag19731938Kolyma
Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
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