Francis Beckett

Plus a bit more star. This was a 60th birthday present and it's interesting to look back and see what my parents must have been going through that year. My parents were communists and my dad had gone to Spain to fight with the International Brigade so the Communist Stalin revelations must have touched them deeply. I already knew about Hungary but hadn't realised that the Suez debacle was happening at the same time.
I liked the way the book ranged back and forward to place 1956 in context and the music and theater covered was interesting but unmemorable.… (más)

Plus a bit more star. This was a 60th birthday present and it's interesting to look back and see what my parents must have been going through that year. My parents were communists and my dad had gone to Spain to fight with the International Brigade so the Communist Stalin revelations must have touched them deeply. I already knew about Hungary but hadn't realised that the Suez debacle was happening at the same time.
I liked the way the book ranged back and forward to place 1956 in context and the music and theater covered was interesting but unmemorable.… (más)

This book tells the story of four young, idealistic women in the 1930s, who, coming from socialist or communist backgrounds, and believing that communism was the future, went to live in the Soviet Union. All in various ways became disillusioned and fell foul of Stalin's terror - Rose Cohen was shot a few months after the arrest of her Russian husband Max Petrovsky, Rosa Rust, daughter of a prominent British Communist who was editor of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, was sent to a slave labour camp in Kazakhstan, while Pearl Rimel and Freda Utley escaped with their very young children, while their husbands disappeared into the gulag or were shot. It's a reminder that Stalin's repressions didn't only happen to Russians and East Europeans, but that some Britons (and Americans) also suffered. It's also a stark and sobering illustration of how originally noble and sincerely held ideals of social justice and peace can be perverted by self-delusion and a series of moral compromises that lead to death and misery, polluting and distorting human relationships down through the generations.… (más)