El Campesino

El Campesino: Life and Death in the Soviet Union, first published in 1952, is the dramatic autobiographical account of Spanish revolutionary Valentín Gonzalez (1904-1983). The book (also titled Listen Comrades: Life and Death in the Soviet Union) details Gonzalez' experiences in the Spanish Civil War, his conversion to communism, and his flight to the Soviet Union following the Nationalist victory. In Russia, however, he is eventually arrested, tortured by the N.K.V.D., and sent to Vorkuta labor camp, a notorious part of the Soviet gulag located north of the Arctic Circle. Gonzalez, thoroughly disillusioned, manages to survive the brutality of the gulag, escaping Vorkuta (only to be recaptured and placed in a nightmarish cell filled with rats and snakes), and eventually completing his sentence and making his way across the border of the Soviet Union and into freedom in the west.