[SOVIET UNION - GULAGS] CILIGA, Ante

Dix Ans Derriere le Rideau De Fer. I: Au Pays du Mensonge Deconcertant. II: Siberie, Terre de L'Exil et de L'Industrialisation

Paris: Librairie Plon / Les Iles D'Or, 1950. Two octavo volumes (20cm). Original printed wrappers, printed in red and black; xi,238 + xiii,310pp. Second edition, with new Preface, of Au Pays du Mensonge; first edition of Siberie. Both volumes inscribed by Ciliga, "avec homage de l'auteur," to American journalist and historian Isaac Don Levine, dated 1950. Minor wear and soil to wrappers, with brief losses to spine ends. Texts unopened past the prefaces.

A noteworthy association. Ciliga, a Croatian communist and co-founder of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, was arrested in Moscow in 1930 after expressing displeasure over Stalin's policies. He spent five years in Siberian gulags before his eventual expulsion from the Soviet Union. He lived out the remainder of his long life (he died in 1998) in Italy and France. The inscribee, Isaac Don Levine, was a Russian-born American journalist who spent his entire career as a Russia specialist, first as a sympathetic observer of the 1917 revolution, later as a fervent opponent of Stalinism and international Communism. It was Levine who arranged the meeting at which Whitaker Chambers revealed to FDR the seditious activities of Alger Hiss and other members of Roosevelt's State Department. Like many disenchanted fellow travelers of the Thirties, Levine devoted his later career to right-wing journalism, editing the anti-Communist magazine Plain Talk and working for Radio Free Europe.

The first volume of Ciliga's memoir was issued by Gallimard in 1938 (and published in English in 1940, as The Russian Enigma), but the second volume did not appear until this 1950 edition. Ciliga's new publisher took this opportunity to reissue the earlier portion in a uniform volume; Ciliga has provided a new Preface for this edition. No English translation of the second volume has ever been published.

Price: $250.00

Go Back