Albert De Leon

Return to Olympus Albert De Leon

Very few books have been written about the 100 million or more human lives that have been lost around the planet since the inception of Communism-Marxism-Leninism (and its Gulags) in 1917. With the notable exceptions of Velikovsky's "We" (1920's), Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World" - all fiction - only a handful of Czech and Cuban works have expounded the eyewitness realities of the hell that is totalitarianism, among them Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"; Vaculik's "A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator," and Armando Valladares' "Against All Hope." Bohdan Wytwycky's "The Other Holocaust" and Miron Dolot's "Execution Through Hunger" also shed a much needed light on the barbaric and oft-forgotten, heinous crimes committed under Lenin, Stalin, (who could easily be accredited with 40 million or more deaths, just Russians and Ukrainians alone), Mao Ze Dong (50 million), Pol Pot (2 million), Fidel Castro (100,000 or more). Collectively, ten times more millions than Hitler's several million gays, Gypsies, Jews and Baltic and Slavic peoples. Along with Romania, Cuba and Czechoslovakia were the most brutal and repressive societies (Cuba is still on the very top of the list), and this book vividly documents the cloak-and-dagger, conspiratorial nature of communism while at the same time detailing the length to which the "dissidence" and basic survival instinct will go to escape the firing squad or the country at any cost. Albert De Leon's book takes us into the private life of two of his closest friends and the fear, the humiliation, the psychological torture and constant harassment to which they - and 25 million Czechs and Slovaks - suffered since 1948 - and 11million Cubans are still subjected to. For both Alexei and Gregorio, the only option was to escape a well-planned escape.