I was invited to Moscow earlier this year to give a talk about my latest book. But while I was there, I wanted to see if I could track down a few survivors of the gulags — the prison work camps where millions died during the communist years. I wanted to film interviews with them to be used as exhibits in a museum of communist terror which I hope to help create.
I asked Anne Applebaum, who wrote Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, if she could offer any advice on finding survivors. She gave me tips but added: ‘You’re a bit late.’ The people who were incarcerated in Stalin’s work camps are mostly dead. It was going to be difficult — perhaps impossible.
Fortunately the people who hosted my talk gave me a phone number for one of the staff at Memorial, an organisation which covers human rights abuses in Russia.
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