Yesterday's Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future

"In Yesterday's Tomorrow, Adamczak responds to right-wing criticism in English of her first book, Communism for Kids, and critiques tendencies on the left to sidestep the dark history and the path that Communism ended up taking. She takes the reader through a series of 8 turning-points in the betrayal of communism, moving in reverse chronological order, from when the Soviet Russians deported anti-Fascists to Nazi Germany in 1939, and moving backwards from there: from the Terror of 1937-39 to the failure of the Left in Central Europe to stop the advent of National Socialism to Stalin's rise to power to Kronstadt. The essential question she asks here is: where did it all go wrong, and digs through one traumatic event after another, digging backward in an attempt to recover some reason for hope that can be utilized toward a future"--
How the communist revolution failed, presented in a series of catastrophes.The communist project in the twentieth century grew out of utopian desires to oppose oppression and abolish class structures, to give individual lives collective meaning. The attempts to realize these ideals became a series of colossal failures. In Yesterday's Tomorrow, Bini Adamczak examines these catastrophes, proceeding in reverse chronological order from 1939 to 1917. Adamczak reflects on the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Great Terror of 1937, the failure of the European Left to prevent National Socialism, Stalin's rise to power, and the bloody rebellion at Kronstadt, as she seeks a future that never happened.