This Rebel Heart

Locke, Katherine. This Rebel Heart. 2022. 433p. ISBN 9780593381243.

Csilla's parents were ardent communists, and they supported the Soviet takeover of Hungary following the Second World War. As Jews, the whole family took refuge in the Danube, the river that runs through the capital city of Budapest following the German invasion in 1944. However, revolutions have a habit of devouring their own, and her parents were soon accused of crimes against the state and were executed by Soviet authorities. Now 18 in 1956, Csilla lives in a paranoid society where everyone spies on everyone else, and one wrong word can get you arrested or worse.

For the last year, Csilla has been planning her escape out of Hungary. As the daughters of two enemies of the state, she is under constant surveillance, and she cannot let her guard down even for one moment. Ready to leave, Csilla suddenly finds herself in the middle of a convulsion that threatens the Hungarian Communist party as student protests escalate into something dangerous. Her parents are publicly exonerated, clearing her pariah status, but also revealing that her father was not the hero she thought he was. 

As Hungary drifts into chaos, with Soviet tanks massing on its borders, Csilla has a choice. She can escape as she planned, and look to a new life away from the painful memories of her youth, or she can stay and fight for a new future for her country, with the real possibility that the result will be violence and death. Can Csilla learn to trust again?

Fans of historical fiction will enjoy this deep dive into a little known part of European history, and will appreciate Csilla's resilience and determination to survive no matter the obstacles in her path. For a similar perspective, this time from the other side of the Berlin Wall, be sure to grab A Night Divided.

Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR's White House Triggered Pearl Harbor

Koster, John. Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR's White House Triggered Pearl Harbor. 2012. 350p. ISBN 9781596983229.

When the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in June of 1941, Stalin could not believe it. Despite warnings from his secret police and his spies across Europe, this surprise attack by Adolf Hitler and his forces came as a shock. Having gutted his own forces with paranoiac purges, Stalin needed to stall the German advance. But with rumblings of war in the Pacific, he also needed to avoid a Japanese attack on his eastern flank.

Using an extensive network of Communist agents and supporters of the Soviet Union (presented with great effectiveness in A Time of Fear: America in the Era of Red Scares), Stalin forcibly sought to promote divisions between Japan and the United States. Employing Harry Dexter White, a Soviet mole deep inside the US Government in June 1941, hostile policy towards the Japanese were implemented, leading to the eventual attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States entering the Second World War as allies of Britain and of the Soviet Union.

What has been deemed by some an intelligence failure to detect Japanese intentions, or what others considered a conspiracy by President Roosevelt to provide a rationale for entering the war, was in fact a large-scale successful covert Soviet operation bent on preventing a Japanese attack on its far-east territories while it struggled with Germany in Europe.

Fans of history will appreciate the meticulous research that went into this book and will be provided with a more rounded understanding of a day that will live in infamy.

A Time of Fear: America in the Era of Red Scares and Cold War

Marrin, Albert. A Time of Fear: America in the Era of Red Scares and Cold War. 2021. 320p. ISBN 9780525644293.

When the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian revolution in 1917, they suddenly found themselves in charge of a backwards country mired in the bloody First World War. Motivated by an ideology that was meant to implement a worker's paradise at the cost of individual freedoms, Lenin and his men instituted Communism in what became the Soviet Union, and pressed for worldwide expansion. Communist parties spread throughout the world, following Moscow's dictating lines and seeking to undermine their own societies for the benefit of a foreign power.

In the United States, the Communist Party of the United States of America was organized to support workers' right in the industrial struggles of the 1910s and 1920s, but in fact acted as a front for Stalin and the Russian Communist Party. Communism became the enemy of the American government, with a long pause during the Second World War. Government investigations by the FBI and McCarthy attempted to unearth supporters and spies of the Soviet Union, while loyalty oaths sought to assure the public that its civil servants were true Americans, despite constitutional provisions of the First Amendment that allowed freedom of speech and assembly.

Over two specific periods, in 1919 and in the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s, the Red Scares saw Communists behind every bush, ready to overthrow the United States and turn it into a vassal of the Soviet Union. In A Time of Fear, Marrin describes the drama and the history of the Red Scares, demonstrating that Communists in the United States were never as prevalent as thought, nor as dangerous to the constitutional order as the methods used to root them out. Fans of history will appreciate learning more about this little known period, and will be able to draw parallels to our current terrorism and white supremacist environments.

The Bolshevik Revolution

O'Neill, Joseph R. The Bolshevik Revolution. 2009. 112p. ISBN 9781604535112. Available at 947.084 ONE on the library shelves.

The late 1800s and early 1900s was a time of social upheaval. Nationalism was emerging, empires were tittering on the verge of collapse, and social inequities between the vast lower classes and those who controlled wealth and the means of production were deeper than before. Russia, which was a military powerful but economically mismanaged and therefore weak country, was governed by an absolute monarch, the Tsar, who could do what he pleased. Social advancement was next to impossible, and corruption was endemic. 

Revolutionaries guided by Vladimir Lenin took inspiration from Karl Marx's the Communist Manifesto and sought to violently overthrow the monarchy and establish in its place a dictatorship of the workers. Russia's economic backwardness meant that the country was still overwhelmingly agrarian, and that workers were a relatively small number of individuals within the economic system. Several protests and strikes took place in the first decade of the 1900s and were violently repressed.

The First World War dislocated Russian economic activities, and incompetence at the front led to a military collapse. Seeing their chances, in October 1917 Lenin and others led workers in rebellion, and they managed to overthrow the government and seizing control of the state apparatus. Out of the ashes of the conflict emerged the USSR, which would come to dominate the communist world for seventy years, until its collapse in 1991.

Tear Down This Wall

Ratnesar, Romesh. Tear Down This Wall. 2009. 440 mins. ISBN 9781608146048. Available as an audiobook from Overdrive.

When the Second World War ended with the defeat of Germany, the country was separated into four zones of control. On the Western side, the zones quickly coalesced together to form the Federal Republic of Germany, whereas the Eastern side, controlled by the Soviet Union, a puppet Communist government was enshrined as the Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR). Dividing the two was an iron curtain stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. The city of Berlin was similarly separated, even though it was deep in the center of the GDR. In 1961, hoping the stem the flow of people from East to West Berlin and thence to Western Europe, the East German security apparatus erected a wall, cutting the city in half. The Berlin Wall became the deadly and ugly symbol of division between East and West.

In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin for the second time of his Presidency, and he pronounced a speech in front of the Berlin Wall that stood just before the Branderburg Gate in which he bemoaned the separation of people and dared Secretary General of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to tear down the wall and allow people to freely travel. This speech, which was little noted at the time, proved prophetic as the Berlin Wall fell two and a half years later. 

Tear Down This Wall is a historical account of the division of Germany, the life and times of Reagan and Gorbachev, the Cold War confrontation between Americans and Russians, and the origins, pronouncement, and impact that the speech had on world history. The audiobook contains the actual speech given by Reagan, as well as extensive interviews with government officials in the Reagan administration as well as American, Russian, and German eyewitnesses to this event.

Fans of history will appreciate the impact the speech had in retrospect on the events that occurred leading to and during the fall of the Berlin Wall, and will develop a newfound respect for collaboration and trust that the two adversaries developed. It is this, more than anything else, that helped both of them "win" the Cold War and avoid the world's destruction, which had seem so plausible a year or two earlier.   

The Red Umbrella

Gonzalez, Christina Diaz. The Red Umbrella. 2010. 284p. ISBN 0-375-86190-4. Available at FIC GON on the library shelves.

Lucía and her family live in Cuba. Two years ago, Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries seized power, and up to the beginning of 1961 it has had limited impacts on Lucía and her younger brother. Her parents, however, have noticed the change. When soldiers show up in town and begin executing perceived enemies of the state, the Álvarez siblings are witnesses. School is cancelled for the rest of the year, as the government attempts to redefine what a Cuban education should be like. The imposition of communist values on her small town change life for the worse. People are now disappearing and are not being seen again. Neighbors begin to inform on other neighbors. Lucía loses access to her beloved American fashion magazines. Her father, who works at the bank, is under tremendous pressure to conform to new values.

As the situation degrades and oppression increases, Lucía feels the tension. When she stumbles upon the hanging body of the town pharmacist, it is too much. Her illusions are shattered. Her best friend, meanwhile, wholly adopts the communist outlook and is drifting away from Lucía. Her father loses his job at the bank and is arrested for hiding his money in the house’s floor. With all the uncertainty, the family is faced with a stark choice: Remain here and fight the oppression at the risk of their lives, or flee.

Lucía and her brother obtain departure visas and are sent to Nebraska, where they meet the Bakers, their foster parents. As things continue to get worse in Cuba, the children will now have to adapt to a new environment and a new language. At first they hope this exile will only be temporary but as time drags on they realize that their identity is already changing.

A coming-of-age novel coupled with a traumatic forced migration, The Red Umbrella focuses on Lucía’s growth as a person and her resilience in the face of life-changing events. Fans of Lucky Broken Girl, which also deals with Cuban immigrant attempting to adapt to life in a new country.