This moving and authentic report delivers a gloomy inside view of Stalinism and became a major literary success soon after it was published – with a million copies sold in Germany alone and translations to ten languages. Wolfgang Leonhard was a 13-year-old boy when, with his mother, he was forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. After his mother’s arrest, he grew up in a home for German and Austrian immigrants there, studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages and joined Komsomol. He witnessed the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in Moscow and was forcibly resettled to Karaganda. A year later, he was called to the Comintern school and, following the dissolution of Comintern, he collaborated with the National Committee for a Free Germany. Leonhard was among the ten officials who, under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht, were dispatched to Germany in April 1945. He not only personally met the representatives of the Soviet occupation zone at the time and of the later German Democratic Republic, but was also involved in the Communist Party and administration’s internal decisions. After Tito broke with Moscow, Leonhard fled to Yugoslavia.
