The Nature and Fate of Soviet Communism in ‘One Day We Will Live Without Fear’

Harrison artfully reconstructs ordinary citizens’ brushes with the Communist Party’s “sword and shield” from discrete reports and data.
The Nature and Fate of Soviet Communism in ‘One Day We Will Live Without Fear’
Cadets of the KGB Moscow Higher Frontier Guards Command Academy parade in Red Square, Moscow, in 1972. RIA Novosti archive, image #700215/Lev Polikashin/CC-BY-SA 3.0
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Nearly a century ago, Bolshevik revolutionaries toppled the legal Russian government and murdered the royal family, establishing the world’s first communist regime.

For the seven decades of the totalitarian system’s existence, the Soviet leadership faced off against a formidable array of forces that threatened their power and ideology. As the Red Army crushed or stood off against communism’s military enemies, securing control over the Soviet people itself was even more essential to the Kremlin’s designs. It is this task with which British professor Mark Harrison’s recent book, “One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Ordinary Lives Under the Soviet Police State,” is concerned.

Leo Timm
Leo Timm
Author
Leo Timm is a freelance contributor to The Epoch Times. He covers Chinese politics, society, and current affairs.