This is the first English translation of Olga Adamova-Sliozberg's mesmerizing My Journey , which was not officially published in Russia until 2002. It is among the best known of Gulag memoirs and was one of the first to become widely available in underground samizdat circulation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn relied heavily upon it when writing Gulag Archipelago, and it remains the best account of the daily life of women in the Soviet prison camps.
Arrested along with her husband (who, she would much later learn, was shot the next day) in the great purges of the thirties,...