Books by Donald T. Critchlow

Lenin. Mao. Castro. Mugabe. Khomeini. All sparked movements in the name of liberating their people from their oppressorscapitalists, foreign imperialists, or dictators in their own country. These revolutionaries rallied the masses in the name of freedom, only to become more tyrannical than those they replaced. Much has been written about the anatomy of revolution from Edmund Burke to Crane Brinton Crane, Franz Fanon, and contemporary theorists of revolution found in the modern academy. Yet what is missing is a dissection of the revolutionary minds that destroyed the old for the creation of a more harmful new. Revolutionary Monsters presents a collective biography of five modern day revolutionaries who came into power calling for the liberation of the people only to end up killing millions of people in the name of revolution: Lenin (Russia), Mao (China), Castro (Cuba), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), and Khomeini (Iran). Revolutionary Monsters explores basic questions about the revolutionary personality, and examines how these revolutionaries came to envision themselves as prophets of a new age.

Before Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" shocked the Western world, some readers already knew of prison life in the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc and other Communist countries. This is a selection of excerpts from nine widely read books from this gulag literature.