There are people whose destiny it is to go far beyond the limits of their biography or background. They generalize many people's experiences and become symbols. The name of General Grigorenko has been such a symbol for five years. The same is true of the mathematician Leonid Plyushch.' These words, written by the Soviet scholar Igor Shafarevich, are likely to echo and re-echo in the mind as the reader absorbs this book. For Leonid Plyushch has become a symbol of the resistance to a crime, and the pages that follow present poignant and irrefutable evidence of that crime.