Years after many of the Zeks––prisoners in the Soviet Union’s gulag system––had been released from their long captivity another round of arrests began. The standard sentence in Stalin’s purge of 1937 was 10 years for presumed political activity. Yet the system demanded so much more than that miserable internment. In 1949 the freed convicts, barely eking out existence as exiles in Siberia, were being absorbed into the Soviet bureaucratic machine once again. It had nothing to do with the people or their behavior, simply that they had once been convicted of political activity and had been born with a particular surname.