The author is a rebel-revolutionary, a leader of the Menshevik Party. He fought against the monarchy and, as a result, was persecuted by it. After the October Revolution he also turned out to be an undesirable element. Having gone through the crucible of Soviet prisons, solitary confinement and hunger strikes from 1918 to 1922, he not only survived, but also managed to preserve human dignity. The experience of being in dungeons turned out to be difficult, but not fatal. After his release from prison and the advent of the New Economic Policy, the author, as undesirable to the new government, was exiled abroad, where in 1929, in Berlin, this book was first published. The content of his essays is devoted not only to a description of prison life, but also to a depiction of the life of Russia at the dawn of the Red Terror. If in countries of political lawlessness prison is always a mirror of life, then this phenomenon is even more pronounced in the revolutionary era.