One of the great classics of political literature in Germany. This moving and authentic account provides a distressing insider's view of Stalinism and quickly became a major success after its release—selling a million copies in Germany alone and being translated into ten languages. Wolfgang Leonhard was a 13-year-old boy when he had to leave Nazi Germany with his mother and emigrate to the Soviet Union. There, after his mother was arrested, he grew up in a home for German and Austrian emigrants, studied at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages, and joined the Komsomol. He witnessed the outbreak of the German-Soviet War in Moscow and was forcibly relocated to Karaganda. A year later, he was called to the Comintern School and worked after the dissolution of the Comintern.