Lea Ypi’s "Free: Coming of Age at the End of History" has met with a hostile reception in her home country of Albania, and it is easy to see why.
Her self-description as a “Marxist Albanian professor of political theory at the London School of Economics” says it all.
Reading Ypi’s book, I was struck by the parallel between her life and that of Viktor Kravchenko, the Soviet official who defected while visiting New York in 1944. His famous bestselling memoir, "I Chose Freedom," became the first substantial eyewitness account of the horrors of Stalinism, beginning with its detailed description of the Holodomor (famine) in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Still a true believer at the time, Kravchenko had participated in enforcing collectivization and therefore knew of what he spoke.
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