The Banality of Evil

Lev Razgon is a true survivor of the old Soviet Union. Now in his eighties, he is one of only two people still living who attended the infamous 17th Party Congress of 1934 which set Stalin on his road to purges and mass murder. Arrested at the age of thirty, Razgon spent nearly twenty years under the shadow of the Gulags – the vast prison. system that Stalinism erected for all those who dared to criticise or who were sometimes just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Razgon's Memoirs, first featured in the Moscow journal Ogonyok, include an array of figures – political and intellectual – whom he met through his experiences. But one of the most striking – and chilling – encounters is related below in an extract from the forthcoming English translation of the memoirs in book form: the encounter he had in a Moscow hospital with a seemingly-ordinary man, one however who brought with him ghosts from the past ...