Volume 30, Number 15 · October 13, 1983
Soviet Heroes
By Leonard Schapiro
Ease My Sorrows: A Memoir
by Lev Kopelev, translated by Antonina W. Bouis.
Random House, 256 pp., $17.95
Memoirs
by Petro G. Grigorenko, by Thomas P. Whitney
Norton, 462 pp., $19.95
Each of these books tells the story of disillusionment with communism. The authors are very different—the one an intellectual, the other a distinguished soldier who only late in life was confronted with problems of abstract politics, which he felt compelled to resolve. Yet in each case the motives for the break of allegiance to the communist regime were the same: its brutality and injustice which so outraged feelings of morality and decency that they could no longer be papered over or justified with theoretical formulas. Solzhenitsyn is probably right in his contention that the Soviet regime would collapse if those who are subject to it ceased to live by the lie and insisted on calling things by their right names, and not by the hypocritical disguises in which ideology envelops them. But will this happen?
Review, 2883 words
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