[2][3] His career before his arrest in 1938 was in great measure due to his marrying into the new Soviet elite and, in particular, two men: his wife Oksana's father Gleb Boky, a high-ranking NKVD officer, and her step-father Ivan Moskvin, a leading figure in the Central Committee.

After moving to Moscow Razgon met and married Oksana, the daughter of Gleb Boky and step-daughter of Ivan Moskvin, who were influential friends and patrons until their own arrest in 1937.

[7] Subsequently, they were published as a book True Stories (Nepridumannoe, 1988), and it was only in a separate and slightly later publication in the Ogonyok library series that Razgon first admitted he had worked for Gleb Boky's organisation.

[3] While admitting Boky's bloody past, in Petrograd in 1918 and in Central Asia during the 1920s, Razgon describes the Special Department as a counter-intelligence operation rather than anything to do with arrests and interrogations.

Razgon's account of life (and death) in the Gulag in True Stories (1988) is one of the most detailed sources there is: it contains a unique chapter, for instance, describing various camp bosses he observed and worked under.

Razgon describes the respect he received for being the son-in-law of Gleb Boky (shot in November 1937) and an existence in which he usually worked in the office as a norm-setter, not out in the forest with the rest of the convicts, felling trees.

At one point in his memoirs he takes issue with Solzhenitsyn and speaks out on behalf of "trusties" like himself, and the camp medical service, who together made things easier for ordinary inmates.

Razgon was an "honoured provocateur", in Antonov-Ovseyenko's words, and was arrested and sentenced together with a group of "too assiduous torturers"; he did not push a wheelbarrow in a camp, he did not fell wood in the taiga, and he was not dying of starvation.

In his chapter about "Niyazov", whom he met in 1977 at Moscow's Cardiology Institute, Razgon tells what that former NKVD executioner had to say concerning the hundreds and thousands of victims of such operations, despatched with a bullet to the back of the head and buried at concealed locations all over the Soviet Union.