This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is the best-documented study of the evolution of the Soviet repressive system of the Main Directorate of Camps, from its creation shortly after 1917 to its dismantling in 1986. Inseparable from the history of the country, the Gulag was not only an instrument of punishment for criminal offenses; mass terror against real and imaginary opponents of the regime, but also a significant factor in the economic growth of the USSR. Only during its heyday - in 1929-1959. - About 18 million prisoners passed through thousands of camps. In the written and oral memoirs of the dead and surviving concentration camp victims collected by the author, in the archive documents there is unique evidence of the life and customs of the zone: the camp hierarchy, national and social characteristics of the relationships between prisoners; a nightmare of slave labor, hunger and humiliation; the price of life and death, dignity and baseness, despair and hope, enmity and love... This true story of the web of the Great Terror is one of the most tragic pages in the chronicle of the 20th century, which, unfortunately, has not become, in the opinion of the author, part of the public consciousness.