Ruth Fischer, charter member No. 1 in the Austrian Communist Party and sister of Gerhart and Hanns Eisler, went to Germany in 1919, was elected to the Reichstag, and become a member of the Presidium of the Third International. In this partly autobiographical account, supported by diligently assembled documentation, she traces the rise of the Communist Party in Germany and its gradual subjection during the 1920's to the purposes and will of the Kremlin.