The memoirs of former Red Army General Petro Grigorenko are a remarkable byproduct of this century’s most influential political invention—totalitarianism. They are based on Grigorenko’s lifelong relationship with the closed society: first as a loyal and worshipful Stalinist, then as a more skeptical military leader, later as a Leninist critical of the regime, still later as a leading activist in the Soviet human-lights movement, and finally as an exile in the United States, stripped of his citizenship by a vindictive act of the Soviet legislature.