The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I myself would like to interrupt in order to tell about Krasnaya Presnya3 in August, 1945, in the Victory summer, but I am shy: after all, in Krasnaya Presnya we could somehow stretch out our legs at night, and the bedbugs were moderate, and flies bit us all night long as we lay naked and sweaty under the bright lights, but of course that’s nothing at all, and I would be ashamed to boast about it. We streamed with sweat every time we moved, and it simply poured out of us after we ate. There were a hundred of us in a cell a little larger than the average room in an apartment, and we were packed in, and you couldn’t find a place on the floor for your feet. And two little windows on the south side were blocked with “muzzles” made of steel sheets. They not only kept the air from circulating, but they got very hot from the sun and radiated heat into the cell.