Gulag

This Book Is Dedicated to

Those Who Described What Happened

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months

waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the

crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue

from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before.

Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a

whisper (everyone whispered there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I said: “I can.”

Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been

her face . . .

—Anna Akhmatova, “Instead of a Preface: Requiem 1935–1940”