Volodya was then fifty-one years old.

Siberia is a land so vast-about three million square miles-that its boundaries are often given as imprecise, roughly extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific region until recently known as the Soviet Far East, and southward from the tundra world along the rim of the Arctic Ocean through a zone of vast forests to the near-lunar landscape of the nontillable, semidesert steppes of Central Asia and Mongolia.

Its use as a site for penal colonies and political exile began in the seventeenth century. The arduous journey, which originally took months, was made easier when the Trans-Siberian Railroad was completed in 1905. That was the railroad the young Bolshevik, Solomon Slepak, once took with his wife and daughter and infant son, Volodya, to a new life in China as a journalist and Comintern agent representing the then-nascent Soviet government. Now his son was riding it into exile as a prisoner of that government.

Always that journey-etap, the Russians called it, the transport under guard-from the initial transit prison to the final destination was the very worst of times for a prisoner. On the train you were allowed out of your cell twice a day to go to the toilet. And you had no idea where the train was heading unless it stopped in local towns and villages to pick up “transits,” prisoners who were being brought to various district centers for trial. From those “transits” you would learn the direction the train was traveling.

During the first day of travel, the train Volodya was riding stopped briefly to pick up two lads. He watched as they were brought into the adjacent compartment. When the train was moving again, he called through the wall, “Boys, where are we traveling through?” and one of them answered, “Through the land of evergreen tomatoes,” and the men in both compartments roared with laughter. Soon they were in a world of tall and broken hills, the train navigating their curving shoulders among dense forests. The Ural Mountains. Their first stop would be the city of Sverdlovsk,

At the end of each stage of the etap, the prisoners were directed off the train and made to squat and wait with their hands behind them, armed guards and killer dogs all around, until they were taken by van to a prison. There they stayed until the authorities organized the next leg of the journey, when they again received their food rations and went off on another train.

Beyond the Ural Mountains, the stops along the journey-Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk-were cities with prisons. They arrived in Sverdlovsk late at night, were counted, taken by van to a prison, strip-searched, and after showering put in a cell. The city served as a hub, as the gateway to the Gulag, the vast system of forced-labor prisons in the USSR. From Sverdlovsk the prisoners went off in different directions: to labor camps, to places of exile.

In Volodya’s cell there were about one hundred beds and 150 prisoners: thieves, criminals, murderers, some making the journey a second or third time.

A “striper,” a man whose striped prison garb indicated he was being sent to a maximum-security camp, seemed to be the acknowledged leader of the cell. He asked Volodya what crime he was being sent away for. Volodya told him about the demonstration. The man said, “Aha, a good kike!”

The prisoners’ class system divided the world into good kikes and bad kikes. The bad kikes were Brezhnev, bureaucrats, members of the Communist Party; the good kikes, Sakharov, all other dissidents, and now Volodya.

Being a good kike earned Volodya respect and a bed for night sleeping; the shortage of beds necessitated their use during the day as well. When Volodya won second place in a chess contest organized among the prisoners, his standing in the eyes of the others rose considerably. A dissident, a political prisoner, a nice fellow, and also a splendid chess player. A good kike indeed!

He was in that cell fourteen days. Each morning they received their daily ration of bread and sugar; three times a day, hot food. There were two sinks and two lavatory pans in the cell. By the second week three-quarters of the prisoners had dysentery. Some lay about like dying men. They lit strips of blankets and burned pieces of bread and ate the charcoal to stop the diarrhea. No one said anything to the authorities. Telling the guards or doctors about the illness might have resulted in a two-week quarantine of the cell, possibly of the entire prison, an embarrassment to the officials administering the trains and prisons-they would have to answer to those above them for the unsanitary conditions of the cells-and brutal vengeance wreaked by prisoners and authorities upon the one who had dared say aloud what all knew but wanted kept silent. Volodya, too, fell ill.

One day a desperately ill Armenian asked the guards for a doctor. The striper had four prisoners beat him mercilessly; in prison language, they “unbuttoned his kidneys.” When the doctor finally arrived, the Armenian said he needed something for a headache.

On the police van to the train that was to take him out of Sverdlovsk, Volodya discovered that the contents of his bag had been stolen and a large rag left inside it to simulate his possessions. The thief was no doubt one of the guards who had searched the bag; no one in the cell would have dared steal from another prisoner. Volodya was left with only the leather sandals and cotton jogging suit he was wearing. A disastrous turn. One of the men in the crowded van removed his jacket and gave it to Volodya. “You’re going to freedom,” he said. An exile was considered a free man by those who were headed to the labor camps. “It’s cold there; take it.”

On the train to Novosibirsk, Volodya was in constant pain from the dysentery and cold in his sandals and jogging outfit and one jacket. Next to him a sick old man who could not control his bladder used one of his own high boots as a latrine bucket, which he emptied during his evening trips to the toilet.

The train halted briefly at one point, and two young women prisoners were brought on board and placed alone in a separate compartment. They were on their way to a labor camp. From their compartment came the sweet sounds of their voices as they sang duets. Russian folk songs. There were eight guards in the car, all Asians. From time to time the singing would stop as guards entered the compartment and raped the women. A normal activity in Gulag life; no woman would think of resisting or complaining.

Normal, too, was the way the prisoners were given water on the train. Twice a day a tank was attached to the outside of the chicken-wire wall of each compartment, and a tap pushed through to the inside. One cup for all in the compartment; it went from mouth to mouth. Near Irkutsk there was a camp for prisoners with tuberculosis. On board the train were many who carried that disease.

It was near the end of August. In Irkutsk, Volodya saw light frost in the early mornings and thin ice on puddles.

One month and two days after he left Moscow, Volodya arrived in the Siberian city of Chita. His father had once had a girlfriend there, during his years as a Bolshevik commander. Volodya spent four days in the prison in Chita. A police van brought him to Aginskoye; he remembers a punishing ride of more than seven hours along a narrow road that wound through mountains and valleys and steppes. In the van were Russians, one very sad-looking man who had killed someone in a labor camp and was returning from his court hearing, and Buryats, who shared their goat cheese and cured lard with Volodya. It turned out that the man had good reason to be sad: This was the second time he had committed murder, and he was sure he would now receive the death penalty.

After a weekend stay in the prison in Aginskoye, Volodya was taken by the deputy chief of police in a jeep the twenty miles to the village of Tsokto-Khangil. It was August 28, 1978.