The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era

Expelled from the Communist Party in 1968 for refusing to testify against a comrade, fired from her job, divorced with two children, Alexeyeva found that being a Soviet dissident meant being an outcast. Writing with journalist Goldberg ( The Final Act ), this member of the Helsinki Watch Group who fled to the U.S. in 1977 offers a luminous, inspirational autobiographical narrative, an insider's account of Soviet repression. Born in 1927, she recalls people disappearing from her Moscow apartment building starting in 1937; a reforming Party activist, she abandoned her faith in ``socialism with a human face'' as she saw friends arrested and sent to labor camps. Studded with glimpses of such dissidents as Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and Anatoly Marchenko, this memoir sums up the experiences of a generation of dissenters. Photos. (Aug.)