Two lives, two names, two perspectives on Soviet communism and its postwar expansion into Eastern Europe.

In the 1930s, Guttmann was a leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia before he broke with the party over the Comintern's strategy of helping Hitler to power. A harsh critic of Stalin's dictatorship and foreign policy, Guttmann became a prominent leftist opponent, outcast by the Party. To escape nacism, he exiled and settled in New York, where he worked under a pseudonym as a leading expert on events in the Soviet bloc and a critic of totalitarianism. Featured in this book are his Czech texts from the 1930s as well as studies and essays he later wrote on the nature of communist regimes, genocide, and anti-Semitism.

Josef Guttmann was a Czechoslovak left-wing journalist and politician of Jewish origin expelled from the Communist Party. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a journalist and on Czech broadcasts on American radio. Jacques Rupnik is professor of political science at the Centre de recherches internationales at Sciences Po, Paris.