As an answer to the Russian problem, and perhaps the Achilles' heel of Stalin's dictatorship, Louis Fischer has singled out the defection of many of Hitler's Russian war prisoners- who refused to go home- as the most ""significant"" evidence of Russia's failure. These accounts of thirteen who fled are those of representative rather than special figures; their stories are ""human and personal and therefore politically illuminating"". You will meet the soldier who decided that ""soviet citizens give too much and get too little""; the university student who know only hunger and terrorization; the young Communist who lost his conviction; the woman whose husband was interned and who preferred ""to go into the unknown"" rather than return; a mother and daughter; a worker; a veterinary; an intellectual; a collectivized peasant; etc. etc. All reveal more than compulsion and coercion, but years of deprivation, fear, suppression which could no longer be endured. And beyond the personal drama of these stories, there is the hope that ""dictatorship fails with the individual"". Not surely saleable, but the Fischer name will add impetus.