Communism and the remorse of an innocent victimizer

the long version

"For decades Americans imagined life under Communist regimes to be grim, frightening, and oppressive. Not so, Bulgarian-born Zlatko Anguelov reveals in this memoir. For the most part, life was just normal. People adjust; bread must be earned; families enjoy each other's company. If Communist governments were oppressive, that oppression became the norm for most people's lives; totalitarianism was mundane and even banal.". "Yet in the morally ambivalent world of the communism in which Anguelov grew up, everyone was both victim and victimizer. Few dissented; few intended evil. More typical were tales of compliance, complicity, and informing on friends and neighbors just as part of getting by. Whether discussing his schooldays, his marriages, or his career, Anguelov inexorably returns to his theme of compliance. In moving but understated prose, he describes his own coming to terms with the harm done by compliance and his gradual shift into a more politically active stance."--BOOK JACKET.