Yesterday's Tomorrow
On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future
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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: 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. In the process, she seeks a future that never happened.
Adrian Nathan West
Translated by
Adrian Nathan West has translated more than thirty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German, including Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, a finalist for both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. An essayist and literary critic, he is the author of the novel My Father’s Diet. He lives in Philadelphia.
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