Autor: Ivan Maistrenko

The author: Ivan Maistrenko was a veteran member of the Ukrainian revolutionary socialist and communist movement, a partisan in 1919 he worked as a journalist in the 1920’s becoming deputy director of the All-Ukrainian Communist Institute of Journalism in 1931. A survivor of the gulag he lived as a refugee in Germany after 1945 and writing numerous works on Soviet politics, economics, history and socialist theory. The introduction author: Chris Ford is a Trade Union Education tutor for the Workers Educational Association, London; he is author of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and the Quest for Omnilateral Liberation (2006) and Socialism, Stalinism and National Liberation: The Ideas of the URDP (Vpered) in the Post-War Era, (2006). For many years he was engaged in support work for dissident movements in the Eastern Europe, working for the Society for Soviet Nationality Studies until 1989 and an editor of Ukraine Today until 1992. He is a founder member of the editorial committee of the Ukrainian Labour History Society.