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.
