Vorkuta (1954, first edition)

Joseph Scholmer's "Story of a Slave City in the Soviet Arctic"

Author

Publisher

Printing Details

First edition, first printing. Hardback in dustwrapper. 20.5 × 13cm, 263pp.

Joseph Scholmer was a German medical doctor and anti-Nazi dissident who was imprisoned by the Gestapo during World War II. After the war, while working in East Berlin, he was arrested by Soviet intelligence in 1949 under false accusations of espionage. Sentenced to 25 years of hard labour, he was sent to Vorkutlag, a vast complex of forced-labour coal mines in the Arctic tundra of Russia. The book provides one of the earliest and most detailed eyewitness accounts of the Soviet Gulag system published in the West, specifically detailing the major 1953 Vorkuta Uprising.

Condition

A good copy. The book itself is in good condition but with some dusting to the page edges. The dustwrapper is rubbed to the edges with slight loss to the top corners and head of the spine, and with general overall grubbiness.