A first-person account of twentieth century Russia, this book brings Russian history alive, helping readers feel the terror and the horror of Soviet Russia through a psycho-sociological portrait of homo sovieticus. Elena Balzamo grew up in the USSR. She describes how her own personal life and that of her entire family were dominated by fear. She decided to study Swedish as an escape mechanism, and the language opened the horizons of a new world to her.Through several crucial moments and key figures in her life, Elena Balzamo describes the oppression and the freedoms, the temptation of exile, the fascination with the West and her loyalty to the land of her birth.

This book is indisputably up to date. Day-to-day fear of a regime that systematically crushes people suffuses every line. How can you free yourself? How can you accept dissimulation and live with the internal dissidence the author calls internal emigration? Through these often tragic family stories, the author makes the struggle for freedom palpable and pays tribute to the bravery of the acts of resistance that contributed, each in its own way, to changing the course of history.