With Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich sentenced to 16 years on what I consider wholly spurious espionage charges (and I explain why I think this), it's a suitable moment first to consider the likely reasons but also what kind of experience faces him in the Russian prison camp system.

That leads me on to discuss three recent books of relevance:

• Vladimir Pereverzin's The Prisoner. Behind Bars in Putin's Russia (Gemini, 2024)
• Jeffrey Hardy's The Soviet Gulag. History and Memory (Bloomsbury, 2023)
• Barry Lewis's Gulag. A photographic journey into the darkness of Stalin's prison camps (Fistful of Books, 2024)

The Eurasian Knot podcast I mentioned with Anna Arutunyan and me talking about our book Downfall is here.

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