WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
I Saw Democracy Murdered: the Memoir of Sam Russell
The Daily Worker and Morning Star foreign editor was a pioneering communist journalist whose reports from the Spanish Civil War to the rise of Solidarnosc in Poland record a life lived on the front line of history, says JOHN GREEN
I Saw Democracy Murdered - The Memoir of Sam Russell, Journalist (left). Members of the International Brigade in the British cookhouse at Albacete raise their fists (right)
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
I Saw Democracy Murdered
The Memoir of Sam Russell, Journalist
Ed. Colin Chambers
Routledge
Pbck £27.99
I Saw Democracy Murdered is the memoir of Sam Russell (1915–2010), a communist journalist and British volunteer with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, based on interviews with him made by Chris Myant and Colin Chambers, who edited the final copy.
The book covers his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, his time as a journalist at the Daily Worker and The Morning Star, and his later disillusionment with Stalinism. In his capacity as a journalist, Russell travelled extensively and was frequently a front-row spectator at significant historical events, from the formerly occupied Channel Islands at the end of World War II to the show trials of communists in eastern Europe in the 1950s.
Many of his generation lived sheltered lives and saw very little of the blood-soaked times they lived through. A few saw a great deal of it, but very few saw as much as Sam Russell.
More from this author
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
JOHN GREEN is stirred by an ambitious art project that explores solidarity and the shared memory of occupation
JOHN GREEN applauds an excellent and accessible demonstration that the capitalist economy is the biggest threat to our existence
JOHN GREEN isn’t helped by the utopian fantasy of a New York Times bestseller that ignores class struggle and blames the so-called ’progressives’
