Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer

Authors: Anna Hyrske & Kirsti Huurre

Finland | Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe) | c 1918 to c 1939 (Inter-war period) | c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2) | Memoirs | Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions | Second World War | Marxism & Communism | Political structures: totalitarianism & dictatorship

Published on 10^th October 2024 by The History Press Ltd in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 2 Maps; 13 Illustrations, black and white
234mm x 156mm | 0g

Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer was originally published in 1942, as war still raged between Finland and Soviet Union. Its writer was a Finnish woman who emigrated to Russia in the 1930s, convinced the new egalitarian state and workers’ paradise would be a better life for her and her young son, hopeful once settled she could send for him. What followed was very different to what was promised: a life in constant fear, under intense government scrutiny, of purges and Great Wraths, good people imprisoned and shot; and state-run propaganda that spun a web of lies around its people. The author eventually escaped, defying the odds when so many of her friends and loved ones did not, and recorded her memories under a pseudonym in what became the second most censored book from Finnish libraries after the war. This is the first English translation of this important memoir, whose original preface states: ‘I simply want to provide an honest account of what my friends and I had to live through under the “Stalinist sun”.’