Laurie Lewis’s memoir begins with her child’s-eye understanding of a family life based on love, fear and lies. Her frightening father, who believes his children need to be beaten for their own good, is an important man in the Alberta Communist Party; her mother, a committed Party member, tries to protect her children from his alcoholic rages and maintains the pretence that everything is all right. Laurie watches her brother’s anger, her mother’s unhappiness, and learns to keep secrets -- her own and other people’s. For a time she and her brother are sent to live with strangers. They are not told where their parents are, because her father is in hiding from the RCMP (who are looking to arrest Communists). When she is fifteen a new life begins as her mother leaves her marriage and takes Laurie with her to New York City. Laurie now discovers the delights and difficulties of rundown but cheap apartments in Little Italy and Greenwich Village. Her mother finds work as an editor and writer, meeting many left-wing artists, and there are eye-opening experiences with men -- for both mother and daughter. Then at sixteen Laurie spends a summer waiting on tables at a socialist resort, where she finds a serious older boyfriend who is much too bourgeois, according to her politically radical mother. With wit, pathos and blistering emotional honesty Little Comrades tells the story of a girl growing up in two countries in a bewildering time of transition and new freedom for women.

Small Comrades is a fascinating examination of Soviet conceptions of childhood and the resulting policies directed toward children. Working on the assumption that cultural representations and self-representations are not entirely separable, this book probes how the Soviet regime's representations structured teachers' observations of their pupils and often adults' recollections of their childhood. The book draws on work that has been done on Soviet schooling, and focuses specifically on the development of curricula and institutions, but it also examines the wider context of the relationship between the family and the state, and to the Bolshevik vision of the "children of October"

In a major reassessment of their work, Evgeny Steiner forcefully demonstrates that the Constructivists were as committed to implementing Utopia - regardless of the human cost - as their establishment counterparts."--BOOK JACKET.

Little Comrades tells the story of a girl growing up in a dysfunctional left-wing family in the Canadian West during the Depression, then moving, alone with her mother, to New York City during America's fervently anti-Communist postwar years. With wit and honesty, Laurie Lewis describes an unusual childhood and an adventurous adolescence.