In the 1930’s at the height of The Great Depression, thousands of Americans journeyed to the Soviet Union, lured by the promise of jobs, prosperity and a new life in the Utopia created by Stalin’s Communist Party. This volume is a disturbing revelation if the fate of these – our countrymen – who were ignored and then abandoned by our government and left to often short, brutal lives ended by starvation, disease, torture or mercifully by a bullet. Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Robert Couquet have I read something as powerful as this volume about the evil of communism and the brutality that Man is capable of inflicting on his Fellow Man in the name of a great ideological myth.
After three years preparing The Triumph of William McKinley by reading very little but books, letters, articles and newspapers from the Gilded Age, I’m trying to get back into my regular routine, which I’ll chronicle here with an occasional review of what I’ve read.
