for the IRA, he took part in a bungled sub-post office raid, in the course of which he shot and fatally wounded the owner's son. The CPGB headquarters and the Comintern's International Red Aid helped the fugitive McAteer flee to Odessa, where he found work as an instructor in a club for visiting seamen.Goold-Verschoyle was both the youngest and the most naı¨ve of the three -when called to Moscow he took his lover Lotte Moos, a German political exile, with him without permission. In 1936, he was sent to Spain as a radio technician for Soviet intelligence. He corresponded with Moos in London, against all rules of clandestinity, making remarks critical of Soviet policy. In April 1937, he was lured aboard a ship, imprisoned, and delivered to the USSR. McAteer and Breslin were simply arrested at home in Odessa and Moscow, victims of a state terror in which all foreigners were suspect. From the end of 1936 to his arrest in 1940, Breslin had been trying desperately to regain his Irish citizenship. Had he succeeded, he would probably have survived.McLoughlin is an assiduous researcher, who has put in a formidable amount of work in Irish, British, Russian, Ukrainian and other archives in order to bring these stories together. He got access to the prosecution records of these three unfortunates, and takes the reader through their imprisonment, interrogation and ultimate fate. Left to the Wolves is a very readable book -the author is an accomplished storyteller. Where the archival trail peters out, he fills in the gaps with memoirs left by fellow arrestees around the same time and place. This certainly makes for a good seamless narrative, although here and there it can blur the distinction between verifiable fact and supposition. Overall, though, this book is microhistory at its best. McLoughlin knows his Irish, Soviet and communist history, and sets the tales of his unlucky heroes firmly in the wider context. The book provides a fascinating insight into a lost world of revolutionary internationalism, inspired by an imaginary vision of the USSR, and destroyed by the reality.