For, Against and Without Communism

For communism: reasons for sympathy go back as far as January 1945, when the Red Army broke through the walls of Budapest’s ghetto to save young György and his parents from transportation to a German extermination camp. Without communism: confronted with Soviet reality, the fervently communist history student soon sobered of his early commitment. When the author had returned to Hungary in 1968, he was sentenced to seven months in prison due to supposed Maoist activities, and so started his life as dissident against communism. 

Dalos, who has been awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Intercultural Understanding, tells the story of his life with unsparing frankness. At the same time, he offers a history of the many lives lived according to the delusion of ‘really existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union from 1956 to its collapse in 1990.