Tomorrow You Go Home: One Man’s Harrowing Imprisonment in a Modern-Day Russian Gulag

An English junior stock broker visiting Russia for a series of business meetings in 2003 is arrested at the Moscow airport with a small bit of hash he’d forgotten in a trouser pocket. Thus begins Hague’s nearly two-year journey through a Russian penal system that seems little changed from Iron Curtain days. After a brief trial, Hague is dispatched to Zone 22, a labor camp in the frigid plains of Mordovia, where he suffers from malnutrition, infections, and physical and psychological torture at the hands of brutal prison guards. Over the months, Hague learns the system and is sustained by the support of his family, girlfriend and sympathetic fellow prisoners. The rhythms of prison life are vividly presented—the fear, petty humiliations and the foul behaviors of men crammed into tight quarters. Hague draws sharp grotesques of the guards and prisoners, and does not spare the reader his own bouts of hopelessness, cowardice and venality. The book’s claustrophobic tone would have benefited by more general detail about Russia and Hague’s earlier life. Still, the author movingly presents his daily struggle to remain human in an inhuman environment. (Oct.)