A young man named Myroslav Marynovych was arrested in 1977 for telling the truth about his country. The crime for which he was sentenced was the distribution of bulletins about human rights abuses in Soviet Ukraine. When he was arrested at twenty-eight, he was an agnostic. When he was released a decade later, he was a Christian ethicist and political thinker. This memoir is a humble, and a humbling, account of a man maturing in hell.

In the 1970s, human rights posed an unexpected challenge to Soviet power. Along with the United States, Canada, and every European state except Albania, the USSR signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. This treaty was a turning point in the Cold War. It confirmed existing boundaries, prepared the way for arms-control negotiations, and affirmed human rights. In the Soviet Union and its east European satellites, citizens seized upon the concept of human rights to define their own public activity. If human rights were now the law of the land, went their reasoning, it must be legal to document violations.

The Ukrainian Helsinki Group, which Marynovych joined in 1976, followed that logic. Its members published information about the harassment, arrests, trials, and sentences of Soviet citizens. This Ukrainian Helsinki Group's activity led directly to the persecution of its members, which was then recorded by those who remained. The milieu was loyal: some of those who were arrested refused to answer any questions at all; Marynovych claimed that he was personally responsible for all of the group's activities.

Myroslav Marynovych was arrested on April 23, 1977, interrogated for nearly a year, and tried on March 22, 1978. He was sentenced to seven years in the Gulag and to five more years in internal exile. The facility to which he was sent, Perm-36, was perhaps the most notorious camp of its time. In the 1970s and 1980s it was used for people deemed to have committed “especially dangerous crimes against the state”: that is, prisoners of conscience. In Perm-36 at this time, as throughout the Gulag during its entire history, a disproportionate number of the prisoners were Ukrainians.