THE HIDDEN RUSSIA

My Ten Years as a Slave Laborer"" -- ""with our own hands. . . building the socialism we abhor"" is an extensive account of the years 1945-1955 after Yugoslavian Nikolai Krasnov, his father, his grandfather- an eminent Cossack General and writer, and his uncle were arrested by the English and turned over (a bitter betrayal) to the Russians. From the particulars of his own experiences in prisons and labor camps, the deadly isolation of a box cell, the meaningless- endless interrogations, the privations, the brutalities, this also gives a broader view of the ""ironclad existence"" in Soviet Russia and expresses faith in its people anxious for both the freedom and the justice they have been denied. His last visit with his grandfather- who was executed, and with his father who could not survive the ten year travail; his complete loss of contact with his wife and mother from the day of his arrest; the most terrible times (1949 on) of liquidation and the death of a good friend; the period of remission and change after Stalin's death brought, finally, his liberation, his return to the free world, and his wife- in Buenos Aires. Impassioned in tone, this extends beyond personal experience to the evidence of other ways of life within the police state and as such has a meaning and a message beyond one individual's internment. Whether it will find a captive American audience seems debatable.