http://www.amazon.com/Assignment-Utopia ... 0837144973
This 1937 publication is an invaluable eye-witness account of the realities of Communism in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s as Stalin was directing the Soviet Union into a dark period of collectivization, state-engineered famine, show trials, and terror (Lyons also just happened to be in Berlin on the way through just as Hitler was taking power in Germany in January 1933, no doubt a frightening experience for a young leftist Jewish intellectual). Lyons wrote this book to expose the realities of what was happening in the USSR to leftist and liberal readers in the United States who, while not Communists, were inclined to be sympathetic to a "progressive" workers' state at a time when the American economy remained mired in the depths of the Great Depression.