Umiskin is a townland in Donegal where the forebears of Kieran Jack McGinley originated. His not-for-profit Umiskin Press publishes books of special interest to the labour movement and the left. In the centenary year of the Bolshevik revolution Michael Quinn lifts the lid on the official and unofficial relationships between Ireland and the communist state until the demise of the Soviet Union. The cast of characters ranges from James Connolly's son Roddy to Big Jim Larkin, Frank Aiken, Michael O'Riordan and Garret FitzGerald on the Irish side, and Andrei Gromyko, Mikhail Gorbachev and the composer Dimitri Shostakovich (who visited Dublin in 1972) in the Soviet ranks. There is an account of a controversial 1955 visit to the USSR by a group that included the writers Anthony Cronin and James Plunkett. The trip was fiercely denounced in the Standard Catholic newspaper, and Cronin wrote a series of articles about it in The Irish Times called "Behind the Curtain".
