Five best books on life in the Soviet police state

David Satter's latest book is It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past.

One of his five best books on life in the Soviet police state, as told to the Wall Street Journal:

Kolyma Tales
by Varlam Shalamov (1980)

The Kolyma region, the coldest area in the Northern Hemisphere, was the cruelest outpost of the Soviet Gulag. Varlam Shalamov, a young journalist, was arrested in 1937 and spent 17 years there. His short stories are the definitive chronicle of those camps. Each is devoted to a single incident told in the voice of an emotionally detached observer. On the edge of death, all human traits are lost, and everything is focused on physical survival, but this is treated by Shalamov as completely normal. In "An American Connection," a group of starving prisoners attack a barrel of grease intended for a bulldozer. They finish off half the barrel before guards arrive. In another story, two prisoners escape from a camp at night and go to a burial site, searching for a fresh corpse from which to steal the underwear. Shalamov's dispassionate narrative and his often lyrical descriptions of Siberian nature give his stories the mesmerizing quality of a message from another world. As Shalamov said: "If you don't believe it, take it as a fairy tale."

Read about the other books on the list.

Learn more about It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway at the Yale University Press website.

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--Marshal Zeringue