Recommended Reading

From my son:

Escape from the Soviets, by Tatiana Tchernavin, 1934. Just finished it. An account of a woman's escape with her husband and son across the border into Finland. It's the kind of book we should have been given to read in school. I seem to recall that the worst thing about the USSR, as we understood it, was that jeans were expensive and people had to stand in long lines. Amazing that with accounts like this people only began to admit to Soviet concentration camps (word author uses in the original, before the German variety became well known) and massive deaths through executions and starvation in the 1980s. If nothing else, it's an excellent commentary on socialism, which she doesn't hesitate to excoriate.