A vivid firsthand account of the early years of the Soviet Union under Lenin's revolutionary leadership —and of the political counterrevolution by a privileged social layer headed by Stalin.
A participant in these historic events, Victor Serge recounts the initial efforts to build a world communist movement and organize Soviet workers to begin constructing the foundations for a socialist society.
Serge provides convincing evidence that Stalinism, far from being an outgrowth of the proletarian course charted by Lenin, was its opposite. He details the determined resistance by thousands of communists to the reversal of the revolution’s internationalist policies. He shows how the consolidation of the Stalin-led counterrevolution necessitated the persecution and murder of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants, as well as the exile, imprisonment, and assassination of the communist leadership of the October Revolution.