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

Russian tourist agencies won’t be stockpiling this one anytime soon. And it’s a safe bet that Tig Hague’s recap of his shocking, two-year, downward spiral through Russia’s prison system—a dystopic, anachronistic, backstabbing world that conjures The Trial and Catch-22 in the 21st century—won’t find its way onto the bedside nightstand of reformist-poser Vladimir Putin, either.

In July 2003, Hague, a junior exec at a London derivatives brokerage, was arrested at a Moscow airport when a customs functionary discovered a thumbnail-size lump of hash Hague had boneheadedly left in a jeans pocket after a weekend bachelor party. Failing to understand the official’s pantomimed bribe demand was just the first misstep in an endless series of Kafkaesque situations. Hague landed first in an atrophied Krastnaya (“Red”) Zona prison outside Moscow ruled by an Orwellian volk (literally, “wolf”), and then in a Churnaya (“Black”) Zona labor-camp hellhole miles from nowhere on the frozen tundra. The cruel wardens and guards are almost as miserable as the foreign prisoners and make a game of delaying parole applications to ensure the inmates’ groveling payoffs of Marlboros, Nescafé and chocolate bars aren’t interrupted.

Rubbing more salt in his wounds (such as constant bronchial disorders, fever, emaciation, malnutrition, and almost losing one eye after being forced to repurpose hazmat suits in a primitive textiles factory), Hague’s Russian-appointed and British-embassy counselors prove equally ineffective cogs in the maddeningly capricious machinery of modern-day Russian jurisprudence. Angela’s Ashes this ain’t, and at times—understandably—Hague lets his vitriolic vengeance get the better of his prose. But his recall of detail is astonishing, and when he really gets rolling he conveys the surprising reality of Russian prison life. Lesson learned: Stick with the vodka in Moscow.

—Craig Keller