In 1932 Margaret Wettlin left Depression-torn America for the Soviet Union, eager to see for herself if communism was the hope for the future. Planning to remain one year, she fell in love with and married stage director Andrei Efremoff, and stayed on for almost fifty years. This extraordinary memoir is the story of how she and her family - and millions of their fellow citizens - struggled to survive the hardships of famine, repression, war, and terrible purges. Fifty Russian Winters is an incomparable and moving document - the only close-up view we have of Soviet life by an American who spent more than half a lifetime inside Russia and who, as Harrison Salisbury says in his introduction, "kept her heart and mind and eyes open - and remembered".