THE ORIGINAL PLAN-OF WAITING UNTIL I WAS ABOUT TO TAKE MY last breathe, or was at least close-before allowing the publication of this memoir proved to be a baseless pretension. Two volumes of the first version of this work were published a few years ago already. Editors' requirements and my own impatience to compete on totally new terrain-the literary marketp1ace-won out. The 869,000 words invested in those two volumes, which comprised more than 2,500 pages, still astound me when I contemplate them, in their solid book form, on the table. Just recently, I said that I had expended tons of paper and tons of breath-the symbolic expression is fitting-on statements, speeches, reports, meetings, interviews and any other verbal form, if such exists.* Well then, a genuine example of that statement can be found precisely in those two volumes. Their weight doesn't quite come to a ton, but in sum they reach ab out seven net pounds (three for the first volume, four for the second). Nonetheless, that which makes an author proud shouldn't bind him to the chief requirements of his impulse. He wrote for someone. And in my case, logically, the reader in mind is none other than the revolutionary combatant. That's who would be well served by my life experience and whatever other knowledge can be gleaned from my remembrances…

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