MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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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)
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
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.
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