This memoir records a life devoted to understanding both the history and destiny of world communism. It also reveals a life lived at the heart of the Soviet experiment, especially as it was tried and tested in Czechoslovakia. The work is a "living history" of some of the most dramatic periods of change in our time, seen first through the eyes of an early and ardent "fellow traveller," then through the sharper lens of an academic striving to make sense of Soviet failures and gross injustices, and finally from the perspective of a scholar, activist, and social critic.