Notebooks for the Grandchildren

Notebooks for the Grandchildren is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand what went wrong after the great Russian Revolution of 1917.

Through the eyes of young Ukrainians like himself, who came of age fighting for the Revolution but were murdered in the late 1930s, Mikhail Baitalsky recounts the Revolution’s hopes—and its tragic unraveling under Stalin. He narrates how Stalin rose to power and carried out the “political counterrevolution” that silenced so many. Arrested three times by the Stalin regime, Baitalsky survived to tell the story of what happened.