Retreat from the Finland Station

Re-reading and thoroughly enjoying. An excerpt:

The Lubyanka was both a prison and a laboratory, a charnel house of the mind in which the technical genius of the modern age was applied to the science of confinement and pain. For seven decades in the Soviet Union the very mention of its name suggested an immense Gothic mausoleum of darkness and secrecy, a place into which men and women would disappear without warning and never again see the light of day. By the summer of 1991, as the reality of the Lubyanka became something of an anachronism under the reformist rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, its demonology became ever more important in defining opposition to Communist power. If communism came more and more to be depicted (with full justice) as arbitrary, obsessed with secrecy and vested with capricious powers of life and death, the Lubyanka was the perfect symbol of those deadly traits. If it had not existed at the time of the failed coup against Gorbachev of August 19-22, 1991, it would have had to be invented.