Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin, brilliantly conveying the reality of their terrible choices. Soviet history has generally been seen either as a story of a political system or the story of its victims. The Whisperers is about Russians from across the whole range of experience under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it; a society in which everyone spoke in whispers- whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them. This is Figes's masterpiece. It is both a gripping and emotional account of lives lived in impossible times and a remarkable example of the power and value of writing history.

In a clear conversation with the reader, Berkman discusses society as it now exists, the need for Anarchism and the methods for bringing it about. Often mentioned in conjunction with his lover Emma Goldman, Berkman was a leading writer and participant in the 20th-Century Anarchist movement. The young, idealistic Berkman practiced "propaganda by the deed," attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892. While imprisoned, he wrote the classic tale of prison life, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist . After his release, Berkman edited The Blast! and Goldman's Mother Earth . Deported to Russia in 1919, he saw firsthand the failure of the Bolshevik revolution and dedicated himself to writing this classic primer on Anarchism.

"This annotated edition of Holocaust survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's postwar memoir follows her life as an investigative journalist during the emergence and deterioration of the communist state in Poland. Once a devoted communist herself, Nomberg-Przytyk recounts how antisemitism and government corruption shattered her illusions"--

"Red Diaper Baby is James Laxer's compelling and extraordinary memoir of growing up in a communist family during the height of the Cold War. When Jim was born in a Montreal hospital, his father was living in hiding under an assumed name. And when it came time to begin school in Ottawa, Jim was enrolled under a false birth date. Throughout his childhood he was repeatedly instructed not to tell anyone what his father did for work. Laxer's parents were dedicated members of the Communist Party, true believers in an ideology that was generally reviled and had been outlawed during much of World War II. From an early age, Laxer was collecting signatures on ban-the-bomb petitions, delivering Party flyers door to door, attending eccentric left-wing Camp Naivelt, and campaigning for the charismatic J. B. Salsberg, a Communist MPP in the Ontario legislature. Dramatic, humorous, and full of period detail, Red Diaper Baby offers a rare look at the McCarthy years through the eyes of a child. It also explains a great deal about Laxer's eventual and crucial role in the founding of the Waffle faction of the NDP, his continued engagement with the left, and his evolution into one of Canada's preeminent intellectuals."--

A fascinating account of life as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain The Lost World of British Communism is a vivid account of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Raphael Samuel, one of post-war Britain’s most notable historians, draws on novels of the period and childhood recollections of London’s East End, as well as memoirs and Party archives, to evoke the world of British Communism in the 1940s. Samuel conjures up the era when the movement was at the height of its political and theoretical power, brilliantly bringing to life an age in which the Communist Party enjoyed huge prestige as a bulwark for the struggles against fascism and colonialism.

Notes from the Other Side of Night is a diary-memoir written upon Juliana Geran Pilon's return to her native Romania in 1975, which she had left along with her family when she was just fourteen. Poetically weaving together modern insight and realities with childhood perceptions, Pilon tells the haunting stories of her parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends. Although the scenery of her native home had remained essentially unchanged since her childhood, Pilon recalls streets that are no more, homes and churches that have been demolished. Yet, the hills and forests, the flowers and mountains, the heat of old Bucharest, remained the same. The scenes and characters described in this book are simply unforgettable. Despite the many tragedies it describes--anti-semitism, political imprisonment, and judicial execution were ruthless realities under communism--Notes from the Other Side of Night is not a depressing book. Pilon writes with a detached melancholy about events and characters that illustrate Hannah Arendt's terrifying "banality of evil." But she remembers, as well, those few who managed to remain human beings until the end. Ultimately, hope triumphs in this memoir. This edition includes a new foreword, which discusses the initial writing and publication of this and previous editions.

In this vivid memoir, Silviu Brucan traces half a century of East European history, bringing to life the drama of a generation caught between the 1944 communist revolution and the 1989 anticommunist revolution. Brucan himself was at the heart of political power from World War II through the formation of a new government after the overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu. After participating in the antifascist underground movement in World War II, he became acting editor of Romania's leading communist daily. He served as Romania's ambassador to the United States and then as its ambassador to the United Nations. He later grew disenchanted with the Ceausescu regime, becoming a prime mobilizer of popular support for reform and subsequently one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front. Brucan's insider position gave him a unique perspective on the inner workings of the Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu regimes as well as of the political machinations of Soviet and other East European leaders. He reveals for the first time the details - available nowhere else - of secret meetings between communist leaders: the 1944 conspiracy with King Michael against the German occupation; the extraordinary 1945 meeting between Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Joseph Stalin when the Soviet dictator decided that Georghiu-Dej and not Ana Pauker should lead the Romanian Communist Party; the secret mission assigned to Gheorghiu-Dej by Nikita Khrushchev during the 1956 revolution to install Janos Kadar as leader of the communist party; the 1958 Khrushchev-Gheorghiu-Dej meeting after a bear hunt in the Carpathians, which appeared to be a chat between two canny old peasants but concluded with Khrushchev's decision to withdraw Soviet troops from Romania; and Ceausescu's astute maneuver to seize power while Gheorghiu-Dej was on his deathbed. Brucan then recounts the real story behind the 1989 revolution, which was rooted in earlier plots to overthrow Ceausescu. He traces his own memorable transformation from staunch communist to outspoken critic of the regime, weaving his own story within the larger framework of his country's transformation and hopes for the future.

In July 1961, just before David Aaronovitch's seventh birthday, Yuri Gagarin came to London. The Russian spaceman was everything the Aaronovitch family wished for - a popular and handsome embodiment of modern communism, of the forward march of history. When Gagarin went to Highgate to visit the tomb of Karl Marx, the local communists came out to cheer, David's father, a full-time worker for the Communist Party, and his mother among them. But who were they, these ever hopeful, defiant and (had they but known it) historically doomed people? In a sense they were like a non-magical version of the wizards of J K Rowling's world, living part secretly with and parallel to the non-communist majority, sometimes persecuted, sometimes ignored, but carrying on their own ways and traditions. Where others went to church they went to Socialist Sunday School, where others watched the Black and White Minstrels they went to see the Red Army Choir (always providing that visas had been issued). Society's up was their down, its heroes were their villains and vice versa. Trade unions were never more noble than when militant, the blacks were right and the whites were wrong. Who wanted American TV when you could have Russian movies? A memoir of early life among communists and an exploration of the world that created that life, Party Animals first took David Aaronovitch back through his own memories of belief and action. But there was much more to it. He found himself studying the old secret service files, his mother's diaries and letters, uncovering the unspoken shame and fears that provided the unconscious background to his own existence as a party animal. Only then did he begin to understand what had come before - both the obstinate heroism and the monstrous cowardice. And the elements that shape our fondest beliefs