Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer: One Woman's Private Diary From 1930s Soviet Russia

Under the Sickle and the Sledgehammer was originally published in 1942, as war still raged between Finland and Soviet Union. Its writer was a Finnish woman who emigrated to Russia in the 1930s, convinced the new egalitarian state and workers’ paradise would be a better life for her and her young son, hopeful once settled she could send for him.

What followed was very different to what was promised: a life in constant fear, under intense government scrutiny, of purges and Great Wraths, good people imprisoned and shot; and state-run propaganda that spun a web of lies around its people. Kirsti / Kaarina eventually escaped, defying the odds when so many of her friends and loved ones did not, and recorded her memories under a pseudonym in what became the second most censored book from Finnish libraries after the war.

This is the first English translation of this important memoir. Its original preface states: ‘I simply want to provide an honest account of what my friends and I had to live through under the “Stalinist sun”.’