THE first memoir in English from a NKVD (KGB) employee who helped to run Stalin’s infamous Gulag prison system is as chilling a document as you will ever read, and is an eye-opener in more ways than one.

The extent of the system is the first shock. More than 400 camps were erected, with some of the labour camp zones being the size of Wales, where some 28 million people served time. Millions were worked to death, millions were executed and millions more were tortured, and Mochulsky, who was a foreman and boss at Pechorlag Gulag NKVD from 1940-46, was at the brutal heart of it. He was a small cog in this huge organisation of evil facing logistical and moral challenges unimaginable in the West.

He was not an evil person per se, but like many ordinary people who ran the camps, he became absorbed by them and in the process lost his humanity. His is an honest and horrifying account showing as it does how easy it is, once ethical boundaries have been crossed, for evil to work its will.

David McLoughlin