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"Gripping" - Kirkus Reviews

Based on true accounts of children's penal colonies that emerged during the 1990s post-Soviet chaos, Going to Zossen is a raw exploration of the bargains ordinary people make under oppressive systems - necessary reading for fans of Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These and Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys.

The year is 1993. In a collapsing post-Soviet mining town, a former serviceman, Vasily Mikhailovich, accepts work as the director of a remote juvenile prison colony. Determined to bring order and empathy to a brutal system, he starts a rehabilitation program for the young boys. But he is soon thwarted by the corruption around him; as he watches the people nearby prosper through deceit and cruelty, he is forced to make a choice: to uphold his principles and risk everything, or surrender them to save his family.

Going to Zossen achieves almost surgical precision in its depiction of the brutal wave of mass child homelessness that swept through Russia after the fall of the USSR - a collapse that produced up to four million "street children," the quickest deterioration of living standards to happen in any country during peacetime.

PRAISE
"A timely revelation" - BookLife
"Will embrace even readers who held little prior familiarity with and interest in Soviet affairs" - Midwest Book Reviews
"Compelling... Historical fiction in the richest sense" -Creation Mag

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• Literature & FictionHistorical FictionRussian
• Literature & FictionGenre FictionPolitical

• Publication Date: February 3, 2026
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 218 Pages
• File Size: 13 KB