"Anna Akhmatova's first husband... N. Gumilev, was shot in 1921 in Petrograd. In the 1930s her then husband was arrested, and... her son. She stood for hours outside the prison in Leningrad, with many others, and wrote a poem about it, the famous "Requiem". ...When Gorbachev came to power, a skeptical colleague told ... that the changes [could be] real if and when Akhmatova's "Requiem" were published. Published it was... almost fifty years after... written. ...[T]he power of poetry in Russian [is] a power lost in the West. Mandelshtam, who perished in a transit camp... once quipped that only in Russia are poets taken seriously, since only in Russia are poets killed for writing it. His own arrest had been largely due to some verses about Stalin: "He rejoices at every execution." ... Zabolotsky spent ten years in camps and survived. Ogonyok (No. 4 1988) reprinted a powerful poem about two old peasants freezing to death in the Kolyma complex ("On a Road Near Magadan")... [T]he belated appearance of Alexander Tvardovsky's... "By Right of Memory", in Novyi mir (No. 3 1987) twelve years after his death... stressed the effects of terror, the universal fear, the falsehoods, the suffering. ...The Ginzburg memoirs are being serialized... also... an interview with her first husband [Pavel] Aksyonov... who also survived seventeen years of labour camp. As for Solzhenitsyn... two works that he wrote when still in Russia, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, may soon appear."