My Father’s Letters

Between the 1930s and 1950s, millions of people were sent to the Gulag in the Soviet Union. ‘My Father’s Letters’ tells the stories of 16 men – mostly members of the intelligentsia, and loyal Soviet subjects – who were imprisoned in the Gulag camps, through the letters they sent back to their wives and children. Here are letters illustrated by fathers keen to educate their children in science and natural history; the tragic missives of a former military man convinced that the terrible mistake of his arrest will be rectified; the ‘letter’ stitched on a bedsheet with a fishbone and smuggled out of a maximum security camp. ‘My Father’s Letters’ is an immediate source of life in prison during Stalin’s Great Terror. Almost none of the men writing these letters survived.