It was time to revise our atlases.
Europe was a river of broken ice,
Russia a mouth widening to a
frozen sea. GULAG was permanent winter.
Innocent, we had traced railways to
romantic ends. The atlas of knowledge showed
obscured crimes, its charts the colours and scale
of blizzards. A new world had been shaping.
Multitudes were shunted across nations.
A chronicle of whispers is the pure
saga, epic of the supreme fiction,
where history is lost, where ten million
lives are broken like glass.
By David Selzer