Back in Time: My Life, My Fate, My Epoch : The Memoirs of Nadezhda A. Joffe

This is the only memoir to be written in the post-Stalin Soviet Union by a member of the Left Opposition that had been formed under the leadership of Leon Trotsky in 1923. Nadezhda Joffe is the daughter of Adolf Abramovich Joffe, the Bolshevik leader and Left Oppositionist who committed suicide in 1927 to protest the expulsion of Trotsky from the Bolshevik Party. She gives a nightmarish and moving account of her fate and that of countless others at the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Nadezhda Joffe survived and her memoir provides us with the testimony of one who experienced, with a high degree of political consciousness, the most tragic events of this century. "Mrs. Joffe writes of the pain and difficulty of everyday life in the Kolyma camps, but the book also contains her memories of Trotsky, which offer interesting personal anecdotes about a man known best for his passion for communism and dedication to the Red Army.--The Jewish News (Detroit) ;Rarely does one come across a book that makes one sad enough to cry and yet able in the end to celebrate the indestructibility of the human spirit. This is such a book."--Theodore Draper, New Republic;