Grey Is the Color of Hope (Magill Book Reviews)

In 1983, during Yuri Andropov’s crackdown on Soviet dissidents, Irina Ratushinskaya was sentenced to seven years of hard labor in a penal camp for revealing the Soviet government’s noncompliance with the Helsinki human-rights accord and for writing poetry filled with “anti-Soviet” sentiment. Ratushinskaya served three years at a remote Siberian prison before being released during the Reykjavik summit as one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s good-will gestures toward the United States.

Most of the book records Ratushinskaya’s life in the Small Zone, a prison within a prison for...

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