A Precocious Autobiography

“It was in this context of being a rock-star poet that he wrote his autobiography at a very young age. It gives fascinating details about his life, which is not quite what you would have expected it to be. But it’s also a manifesto in favor of what would later be called ‘socialism with a human face.’…The memoir is a kind of monument to a particular way of thinking…What is so striking is the conviction with which he believes that it can all be reformed, and the excitement. There is this ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ feeling which was characteristic of that period of the Khrushchev thaw” Read more...

The best books on The Soviet Union

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Historian