Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Shalamov (Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, 1907–1982) was a Soviet writer, poet, and dissident. A student of law in the 1920s, he was writing poetry and was a member of the Left Opposition, illegally printing and distributing Trotskyist anti-Stalinist samizdats, for which he was sent to Kolyma labour camps. He is best known for his Kolyma Tales, which describes the inhuman trials, incredible suffering and monstrous crimes endured during his twenty years in the Gulag. Despite this, Shalamov never joined the anti-communist religious émigré ranks of Solzhenitsyn and refused to play by the rules of Cold War politics.