Gulag Lite
Book review of To Build a Castle by Vladimir Bukovsky

There’s an unofficial trilogy about Russia’s prison camps.
The first, The House of the Dead, is Dostoevsky’s fictionalized memoir of his years in a Siberian labour camp during the days of the Tsar.
The second, Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, documents through secretly collected personal accounts the massive expansion of this system for supposed political prisoners during the dark years of the early Soviet state. I’m partway through and it’s clear that at this stage the camps are far worse, and far less logical, than in Dostoevsky’s time.
Today I’ll review the third: Bukovsky’s testimony about the Soviet imprisonment of dissidents during the post-Stalin era.
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