Our Own People : A Memoir of Ignace Reiss and His Friends.

Name: Our Own People : A Memoir of Ignace Reiss and His Friends.
Author: Elisabeth K Poretsky

von Elisabeth K Poretsky Verlag: London [u.a.] : Oxford University Press,

Erschienen 1969. - 22 cm, gebundene Ausgabe, Leinen mit Original-Umschlag,

X, 278 S., Zustand: leichte Gebrauchsspuren, Einband etwas berieben, nur der Schutzumschlag etwas abgenutzt, teils Markierungen und Notizen im Text u. im Nachsatz, sonst gutes Exemplar. Text, Sprache: Englisch, Reiss, Ignaz, 1899-1937 , Ignace Poretsky, whom the world came to know of as'Ignace Reiss', was a Polish Communist who had been a Soviet intelligence agent for some fifteen years when-in July 1937, in the midst of Stalin's purges-he broke with the regime and left the service of the N. K.V. D. A few weeks later his body was found by a roadside in Switzerland-thus bearing out the saying current among foreign Communists in the Soviet services : 'Either the enemy will hang us or our own people will shoot us.' Though his death was an international cause célèbre, the story of 'Ignace Reiss' has never been fully told. Now his widow, Elisabeth Poretsky, who shared his life as an illegal worker in various European cities and in Moscow, and who narrowly escaped being killed when he was, has set down a valuable record of his life and death, and those of a circle of his friends from the same little town in Galicia who also served the revolution, and became its victims. Her memoir has, as F. W. D. Deakin notes in his Preface, 'a special haunting quality'. It is 'a meditation, historical and deeply human, on the fate of ... a generation of revolutionaries, adding to the understanding of their hopes, and lighting up the history of their seduction and destruction'. Some months before her husband's death, Elisabeth Poretsky went alone to the Soviet Union on what was to be a final visit. Her account of Moscow in 1937, at the height of the terror, forms the central chapter in Our Own People. As she parted from Poretsky's Polish friends, all soon to be liquidated, one of them gave her a message for him : 'Never come back, not under any circumstances ; perhaps one of you will live to tell about us.' This book, written after more than thirty years of withdrawal and reflection, is the response. K 050

Elisabeth K. Poretsky, Our Own People, A Memoir of Ignace Reiss and His Friends, Sowjetunion, Geheimdienst, Spionage, Russland, Gehaimagent, Spion, Geschichte 1899-1937 , Secret service Soviet Union