Though his name may be unfamiliar to most Americans, Avraham
Shifrin was arguably the world’s top authority on the Soviet
system of prisons and slave-labor camps. His exhaustive research
on the subject, spanning some 45 years and including the decade
during which he was himself a "guest" of the gulags, stands as a
stark reminder of the true nature of the loathsome system which
spawned such currently heralded "former" communist luminaries as
Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, and sundry leaders of
erstwhile Soviet states and satellites. On March 5, Shifrin
passed away in Jerusalem at the age of 74. Avraham Shifrin was
born on October 8, 1923 in Minsk, Byelorussia, and was raised
and educated in Moscow. In 1938 his father was arrested during
one of Josef Stalin’s political purges and disappeared into the
gaping maw of the gulags. Three years later, Shifrin was
inducted into the Soviet Army after Hitler’s troops invaded
Russia. As the son of an "enemy of the people" he was assigned
to a pathetic penal battalio