By a young man who escaped the Germans in Czechoslovakia in 1939, and since the end of the war has been fighting "on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain", this is an experienced and disturbingly dispassionate record of the way in which Communism came to Czechoslovakia, the lack of moral balance in a beaten people motivated by fear rather than faith, susceptible to greed, hatred, ambition. From the defeat of the Germans to the Liberation of the Red Army, that unending "flood from the steppes", this traces the substitution of one regime of serfdom for another, the affinity of methods- whether blackmail or bribery, the conquest of a people who reasoned realistically that it was better to be a supporter than a victim, better to be safe than sorry, and who in the skin game of self-preservation found few tangibles in the dim democratic assurances. And the cheerless conclusion is that war is a surety. Alarming, affecting. (Kirkus Reviews)