In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream — and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.

Few readers of that science journal, Solzhenitsyn observed, would have understood what sort of people rush to eat prehistoric creatures. But he and his friends had understood immediately, for they, too had been zeks, the half-starved prisoners of the network of hundreds of forced labor camps spread across the world’s largest country like a string of islands. Each of those islands had been governed by the Soviet Union’s “Main Camp Administration,” whose Russian acronym was GULAG.