The book also depicts the tragic fate of groups of British Communists who encountered Stalinism at first hand in the USSR. Much of the information in this section, as elsewhere in the book, is the result of new research on released material form previously closed archives in Moscow. These perceptive readings of individual lives qualitatively extend our comprehension of the complexities of the European left, particularly when read alongside the editors's essays which explore the importance of biography to history in general and to communist history in particular.