Murder, Inc.

The gulag was everywhere in the Soviet Union, not just on remote islands in the White Sea or the permafrost of the Far North. There were camps in the center of Moscow, too. In the early 1950s, for example, some 12,000 men and women — a mix of political prisoners and criminals — worked in Stroilag in the Lenin Hills, a beauty spot overlooking the capital, building parts of Moscow State University and other academic institutions. Elsewhere in the city, prisoners built ports, airfields, homes and even dachas in the élite villages of Barvikha and Zhukovka, now the preserve of Russia's...