Hell On Earth: Brutality And Violence Under The Stalinist Regime

The author's father, a civil engineer, left Poland for the Soviet Union in 1931. An idealistic communist, he believed it was his duty to emigrate, and to contribute to the building of a new society. His wife and his infant son followed soon after. In 1938 he was arrested and sent to a Gulag camp in Kolyma, where he became a slave in Stalin's state of proletarian dictatorship, and died two years later at the age of 36.
The author, a retired physics professor, shares what he knows and thinks about Stalinism. Educated in the Soviet Union (elementary school), in Poland (high school and master's degree) and in France (Ph.D. in nuclear physics), he came to the United States in 1964. He deliberately avoided talking about Stalinism and concentrated on teaching and research.
Approaching retirement, however, he wrote an essay on Stalinism, entitled "Alaska Notes." It describes the gruesome Soviet reality, focusing on Kolyma, where his father died. That essay was posted at the internet discussion list at Montclair State University. The lively discussion that followed, mostly among professors, convinced the author to transform the essay into this book.
It also convinced him to write “Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality.” The second book--his autobiography--is based on a diary kept between 1946 and 2004 in the USSR, Poland, France and the USA. It traces his ideological evolution from one extreme to another--from a devoted Stalinist as a student in Poland, to an active anticommunist after retiring. Writing these two books was a moral obligation to his parents, to millions of other victims of Stalinism, and to Poland. The diaries on which the second book is based, written mostly in Polish, are preserved in Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University.