Vladimir Bukovsky has spent twelve of his thirty-five years - over half his adult life - in prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals. He was only a student when he was arrested for the first time, a victim of the crackdown on political demonstrations in the early 1960's. He was expelled from university and physically attacked by the KGB after organising readings of unpublished poets in Mayakovsky Square in Moscow. Two years later, in 1963, he was sentenced without trial to indefinite detention in the prison hospital at Leningrad, where ten per cent of the inmates were political prisoners like himself. From then on he was perpetually in and out of prison, struggling to come to terms with his persecution: threats against his family, continual attempts to trap and tame him, severe physical deprivation of all kinds.
Bukovsky is a naturally gifted writer and this book is a major document in the history of human rights.
