‘My faith is in no way shaken’

horror, barely 80 years old?

Some writers find the one to stand for the all: an everyman to focus the reader’s horror and pity. The French writer Olivier Rolin found his when he was shown drawings and watercolours made by Alexey Wangenheim, an inmate of the Solovki prison camp in Russia’s Arctic north during the Thirties. He made them for his daughter, and they are reproduced as touching miniatures in this slim, devastating book, part travelogue, part transliteration of Wangenheim’s few letters home.

While many undesirables were labelled by national or racial identity, a huge number were betrayed by their accomplishments. Before he was denounced by a jealous colleague, Wangenheim ran a pan-Soviet weather service. He was not an exceptional scientist; he cannot be relied on “to give colourful descriptions of the glories of nature”, writes Rolin, with a biographer’s regret. Wangenheim was simply an efficient bureaucrat.

But in his early fifties, in 1934, he was made to set sail with over a thousand other prisoners for a secret destination not far outside the town of Medvezhegorsk. There, some time around October 1937, a single NKVD officer dispatched the lot of them, though he had help with the cudgelling, the transport, the grave-digging. While he went to work with his Nagant pistol, others were washing blood and brains off the trucks and tarpaulins.

Right to the bitter end, Wangenheim is a boring correspondent, always banging on about the Party. “My faith in the Soviet authorities has in no way been shaken” he says. “Has Comrade Stalin received my letter?” And again: “I have battled in my heart not to allow myself to think ill of the Soviet authorities or of the leaders.”

Rolin makes gold of such monotony, exploiting the degree to which French lends itself to

Wangenheim tried to teach his daughter arithmetic with these diagrams