Vernon Press has acquired World English Rights rights to a book that follows the work of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, and expands on the spectrum of GULAG stories.

The testimonies, gathered between 2001 and 2005 of actors implicated in different aspects of Soviet life roughly through the period 1917-1956, are from ex-prisoners of the GULAG, survivors of the Siege of Leningrad, veterans of the Russian front in World War II, military men and common people, in cities and the countryside. This book presents autocracy not merely as a past historical curiosity, but as a present call of alarm before the advances of autocracy seen throughout the world today.

Echavarren notes, “The details of the Jewish Holocaust have become part of our history through the testimony of those who survived the death camps. The details of Lenin’s and Stalin’s reign of terror are far less known because they took place behind a wall of secrecy, and because survivors have been loath to speak about them for fear of retribution.”

Roberto Echavarren is a Uruguayan poet, novelist, essayist and translator with a Ph.D. from the University of Paris VIII and taught at New York University from 1975 to 1995 in the Spanish and Portuguese, and Comparative Literature Departments. He is the director of La Flauta Mágica publishing company, specializing in critical bilingual editions of poetry and the rescue of major poetical works written in Spanish.

Prizes include the National Prize of the Ministry of Culture of Uruguay, essay; National Prize of the Ministry of Culture of Uruguay, poetry; Nancy Bacelo Foundation Poetry Prize; Cultural Center of Spain Theatre Prize.