Hello, my name is Anatole Konstantin. When I was ten years old, my father was taken from my home in the middle of the night by Stalin’s Secret Police. He disappeared and we later discovered that he was accused of espionage because he corresponded with his parents in Romania. Our family became labeled as “enemies of the people” and we were banned from our town. I spent the next few years as a starving refugee working on a collective farm in Kazakhstan with my mother and baby brother. When the war ended, we escaped to Poland and then West Germany. I ended up in Munich where I was able to attend the technical university. After becoming a citizen of the United States in 1955, I worked on the Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Launcher and later started an engineering company that I have been working at for the past 50 years. I wrote a memoir called “A Red Boyhood: Growing Up Under Stalin”, published by University of Missouri Press, which details my experiences living in the Soviet Union and later fleeing. I recently taught a course at the local community college entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire” and I just released the sequel to A Red Boyhood titled “Through the Eyes of an Immigrant”. My latest book, "A Brief History of Communism", is available now.
Read my first online Q&A (Reddit AMA)
