In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad . . . Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold . . . Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “I can.” Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face. • Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem, 1935–1940”
