Author Information: Lev Kopelev was a Soviet Russian author and a dissident. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages in 1935 in the German language faculty, and after 1938 he taught at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. When the Great Patriotic War broke out in June 1941, he volunteered for the Red Army and used his knowledge of German to serve as a propaganda officer and an interpreter. Sharply criticized atrocities against the German civilian population and was arrested in 1945 and sentenced to a ten-year term in the Gulag for fostering bourgeois humanism and for "compassion towards the enemy". In the sharashka Marfino he met Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Kopelev became a prototype for Rubin from The First Circle.

Released in 1954, in 1956 he was rehabilitated. Still an optimist and believer in the ideals of Communism, during the Khrushchev Thaw he restored his CPSU membership. In 1957-1969 he taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts. After 1966, Kopelev actively participated in the human rights and dissident movement. In 1968 he was fired from his job and excluded from the CPSU and the Writers' Union for signing protest letters against the persecution of dissidents, publicly supporting Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel and actively denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He also protested Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers' Union. For his political activism and contacts with the West, he was deprived of the right to teach or be published in 1977. Kopelev died in 1997 in Cologne, Germany.

Book Description: A well-known Soviet dissenter tells the story of his early years when he was an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin's regime and was only gradually disillusioned as the discrepancy between his inculcated beliefs and the evidence before his eyes became more and more apparent. Includes Kopelev's eyewitness account of Holodomor. (From Foreign Affairs)

Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter WRY: "Account of a young man's childhood as a Communist believer in Ukraine. This man is the "Rubin" in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle."