Word: campesinos
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...CAMPESINO: LIFE AND DEATH IN SOVIET RUSSIA (218 pp.)-Valentín González and Julian Gorkin-Putnam...
...Campesino," he was called-The Peasant-and all over the world the leftist press worked overtime to make him a dazzling symbol. Ilya Ehrenburg, one of Russia's top journalists, fawned over him. Picture posters of him were tacked up all over the U.S.S.R. Then something happened, and The Peasant lost his hero's rating. El Campesino's Life and Death in Soviet Russia tells what happened, and it was really quite simple. The Peasant went to Russia, saw Communism in practice and kicked over the traces...
There have been many books about disillusioned Communists, some of them excellent, most of them stereotyped. Hardly a week passes without its book about Soviet slave camps. But El Campesino's story, direct, terse and without presumptions to literary grace, has the persuasiveness of crushing truth. Though it has none of the art of Darkness at Noon, it belongs beside Koestler's book on the shelf set aside for the literature of human shame...
When Franco defeated the Loyalists, El Campesino was a division commander. At the last possible moment, he escaped to North Africa in a motor launch, made his way to France and got a hero's welcome from the French Communists. Next he was sent to Moscow, where he was lionized and appointed to the Frunze Academy, the U.S.S.R.'s most important military school. Against his will, he was to be groomed for the Russian army. To his disgust he was forced to accept a new title and name: "Komisaro Piotr Antonovich...
...Campesino boomed his accusations: "I am fulfilling the sacred pledge I made to the millions of Soviet camp inmates, also the pledge I made to those Old Bolsheviks who helped me to escape . . . It is the labor of millions of slaves that provides the Soviet Union with the means to rearmand to pay its foreign agents and the lawyers in trials like this...