E-Books →Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer One Woman's Private Diary from 1930s Soviet Russia

Free Download Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer: One Woman's Private Diary from 1930s Soviet Russia by Kirsti Huurre, Anna Hyrske
English | April 22, 2025 | ISBN: 1803996692 | 224 pages | PDF | 7.70 Mb
Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer was originally published in 1942, as war still raged between Finland and Soviet Union. Its writer was a Finnish woman who emigrated to Russia in the 1930s, convinced the new egalitarian state and workers' paradise would be a better life for her and her young son, hopeful once settled she could send for him. What followed was very different to what was promised: a life in constant fear, under intense government scrutiny, of purges and Great Wraths, good people imprisoned and shot; and state-run propaganda that spun a web of lies around its people. Kirsti / Kaarina eventually escaped, defying the odds when so many of her friends and loved ones did not, and recorded her memories under a pseudonym in what became the second most censored book from Finnish libraries after the war. This is the first English translation of this important memoir. Its original preface states: 'I simply want to provide an honest account of what my friends and I had to live through under the "Stalinist sun".'