She says the prison in Russia is a copy of the Soviet gulag system, with better conditions.

In 1982 it was still not acceptable to tell the truth, that these were smuggled out of Soviet gulags.

Shalamov's writing has a light, clear-eyed quality, even if the subject is the inhumane futility of life in the Soviet gulag.

Gray rejoices and refers me to Solzhenitsyn's description of the "law of the last half-inch" in the Soviet gulag.

Western historians estimated that 30-60 million people died in Soviet gulag labour camps, in executions and during famine under Stalin.

PARIS - Russian dissident writer Andre Sinyavsky (71), who spent several years in a Soviet gulag, died in a Paris suburb of cancer yesterday.

Alexander Imich, who was born in Poland in 1903 and survived a Soviet Gulag, emigrated to the United States in the 1950s.