For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania\'s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades.
Now one of the world\'s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom..
With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort--here recounted with outstanding literary talent.
And when the early \'90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the free market, Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking.
When Lea\'s parents spoke of relatives going to university or graduating, they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil.
One\'s biography--class status and other associations long in the past--put strict boundaries around one\'s individual future.
Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia.
That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests.
For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania\'s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades
