ABSTRACT
The uniqueness of our Soviet situation lies in the decades through which historical truth within our country lived on only through underground memory. Publications which appeared in the West, broadcasts from foreign radio stations, and manuscripts secretly circulated in samizdat form only began to seep through comparatively widely as recently as the 1960s and 1970s. Before that there was only silence, or at the most, rare whispers between intimates, because to tell anyone about the prisons and concentration camps was deadly dangerous.
