With Perestroika in full flood in the late 1980s, Vitaly Shentalinksy was involved in urgent efforts by the Moscow Writers Union both to reshape the future for Soviet writers and to escape from the amnesia of their recent past. This involved doing justice to the writer victims of Stalin, whose fates were often cloaked in official cover up and opacity, and after a lengthy campaign it resulted in the opening up of the KGB's literary archive. A remarkable amount had survived - depositions made by leading writers under questioning, threats and sometimes torture; original manuscripts which the police had impounded; official or semi official correspondence between Stalin's chosen lieutenants and the sinister small fry of agents and informers and secret police. The Terror, it is plain, did not originate with Stalin - the whole dark story of Gorky's last years after Lenin had marked him for silencing, the engineered death of Gorky's son which broke his father's strong spirit, the lust of the OGPU chief Yagoda for Gorky's attractive daughter in law, and the writer's own last illness, cumulatively make Kafka sound like Georgette Heyer, just as some of the other interrogations make Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor resemble a kindly parish priest. The squalid fate of Mandelstam in the Gulag, the shooting of Isaac Babel and of the remarkable priest scientist Pavel Florensky, the cat and mouse game which Stalin played with Bulgakov, the brutal death of Meyerhold, all add up to a catalogue of homicide, corruption and even sadism which is nightmarish to read about, yet has an eerie fascination. It is good to note that some of the official villains (many of them semi literate) met a suitable fate at the hands of their own kind; but the majority, no doubt, either walk about free in Russia today or have since died peaceably in their beds.