ABSTRACT
Dmitri Petrovich Vitkovsky, born in Riga in 1901, was the youngest of six brothers. His father, a railway offi cial, and three brothers were killed in the Great War. The October Revolution interrupted his studies at the Cadets School in Moscow; he crossed the country to study at the Tomsk Institute of Technology, the only university still functioning. There, like all other students, he was drafted into the White army. This led to his fi rst arrest in 1926. Released in 1929, he was rearrested in 1931 and sent to Solovki and then Belomorkanal. He was eventually allowed back to Moscow in 1954, and later rehabilitated. ‘Polzhizni’, his memoir of the GULAG and of exile, was submitted to Novyi Mir magazine, where Vitkovski met Alexander Solzenytsyn. But for a stroke Vitkovsky would have been the editor of Solzenytsyn’s The GULAG Archipelago. He died in Riga in the summer of 1966.
