Red Tempest: The Life of a Surgeon in the Gulag

Maria Hrycaiko Zaputovich lectures in Chinese, Russian, and Japanese
history at the universities of Guelph and Toronto.

Although this book bills itself as a serious account of life in the
Gulag, it seems to be tailored for a more mainstream audience with its
emphasis on sex (beautiful women are given to throwing themselves at the
author’s feet) and on bravado (Vogelfanger’s) in the face of
interrogating KGB officers (an unlikely scenario). Less of a
crowd-pleaser is the author’s fondness for dull “philosophical”
discourses. Far more disturbing are his attempts at rationalizing the
horrific Ukrainian genocide of 1932–33 (under Stalin’s Commissar of
Agriculture, Lazar Kaganovich) by pointing to the “good in the
system.” Next to this, the self-aggrandizement that pervades the book
is a relatively minor flaw.