Heyna’s Socialist Wonderland is at once a personal life tale and a unique human story of a complete outsider. Growing up in Siberia as a son of an underground church pastor, he struggled with the tension between a Socialist utopia and the Christian faith. Two incompatible realities. 

A captivating historical insight into the lockdown country of the USSR. It pictures daily life in the authoritarian system through the eyes of a child in the 1960s and 1970s. Andrej’s Heyna’s Socialist Wonderland is perhaps the most sarcastic and funny story about applied Marxism. Although it follows one boy’s journey into manhood across several USSR republics, Public School Indoctrination, Soviet Army, it also follows the Voth family, who are persecuted, discriminated against, arrested, imprisoned and, in the end, forced to flee the socialist paradise and find a new home in the rotten western bourgeoisie. 

From their trials and their repeated collisions with dictatorial bureaucrats, Andrej creates an intensely human yet majestic drama in its moral, romantic and spiritual concept, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity and unwavering positivity. Absolutely recommended to readers who want to deepen their understanding of the life behind the iron curtain.