These Notebooks are for you who are generations away from the great Russian Revolution of 1917 and seek to understand what went wrong. Baitalsky describes the process through the eyes of young Ukrainians like him, who came of age fighting for the Revolution but were murdered in the late 1930s as the Revolution “degenerated” under Joseph Stalin. How did Stalin come to power and manage to retain power? What did this “political counterrevolution” look like to this Ukrainian–and Jewish–communist In the 1920s and after? Arrested three times by the Stalin regime, Baitalsky survived to tell you what happened.