Freda Utley, an Englishwoman who is a Marxist and is married to a Russian, moves with him to the Soviet Union during the 1930's and finds out what life is really like in Stalin's worker's paradise. After her husband is arrested and disappears, never to be heard from again, she is able to get out with her children.
Althouogh disillusioned by by Stalin's regime and the harsh life and daily terror that it has imposed on the Soviet people, she still hasn't abandoned all of her Marxist beliefs, although she would later do so and become a regular columnist for the conservative newsletter Human Events.
Vorkuta by Joseph Scholmer, trans. by Robert Kee (New York: Holt, 1955)
Joseph Scholmer, the author, was a member of Germany's Communist underground resistance movement during WWII. Liveing in East Berlin after the war, he was arrested by the East German secret police on trumped-up charges. Despite being a hero to the Communist cause during the war, he was tortured into confessing his "crime" and is shipped off to the Soviet Gulag. He winds up in Vorkuta, a Gulag camp in the arctic and remains there until 1953, when he takes part in a revolt by the prisoners.
Scholmer remarked that when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, had he chosen to announce that he was coming to liberate the Soviet people from Communism instead of to enslave them, four million Soviet citizens would have joined his army.
Total Terror: An Expose of Genocide in the Baltics by Albert Kalme (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951)
I read this in high school and re-read it more recently. This is a graphic account of the atrocities perpetrated in the Baltic states by the Soviets,
Those atrocities are why in both the Baltics and Ukraine those native SS units are viewed as heros. In the Baltics the Soviets maintained KGB internal security divisions up until the USSR broke up. Ukraine kept a resistance going up into the 1950s. Balts and Ukrainians had to make a deal with the devil to kill Russian communists; in their minds a greater devil. The West was in no position to help and at the time - WWII allied with the greater devil. In the warmth and comfort of our living rooms we should be thankfull we were never faced with such a Faustian bargain and let’s hope we never will be