This was because the Star Prisoner was their intimate friend and colleague of many a year, Comrade Karl Radek, until recently the No. i writer on foreign affairs of the Stalin official press.

Up before famed Judge Vassily Ulrich, “Stalin’s Executioner,” stood Comrade ... a foreign journalist made me an offer through Radek, to transmit secretly, if need be, a letter to my friends ...

Radek was imprisoned, Bukharin shot, and one by one the names on Volume One’s title page disappeared in Stalin’s great liquidation. By 1938, when the purge was hottest and Volume 37 appeared ...