I Must Betray You Study Guide

Ruta Sepetys was born to Lithuanian immigrants—her father fled Lithuania during its occupation in World War II. From a young age, Sepetys was steeped in stories of her heritage, which sparked an early interest in history and storytelling. After attending Hillsdale College in Michigan, where she graduated with a degree in International Finance, Sepetys embarked on a career in music, managing rock bands. Sepetys later transitioned to writing, eventually publishing her debut novel, Between Shades of Gray, in 2011. The novel explores the Soviet deportation of a Lithuanian girl and her family to Siberia and was inspired by Sepetys’s family’s history. It received widespread acclaim for its historical accuracy. The novel saw commercial and critical success, and it has been translated into over 30 languages. Her subsequent novels, including Out of the Easy (2013) and Salt to the Sea (2016), cemented her reputation as a major name in historical fiction and young adult fiction. More recently, Sepetys released The Fountains of Silence in 2019, a book about Francoist Spain, and I Will Betray You, her 2022 book about the Romanian Revolution.

Primarily, the novel centers on the Romanian Revolution of 1989, an event that decisively ended Nicolae Ceaușescu’s authoritarian rule and brought down the last Communist government in Eastern Europe. Economic stagnation, political repression, and societal discontent with the lack of basic freedoms all fueled the revolution. Throughout the 1980s, Ceaușescu’s policies to repay foreign debts plunged Romania into severe economic crises. These policies drastically cut the availability of basic goods and caused widespread suffering. The regime also enforced extreme censorship and surveillance. The revolution began on December 16, 1989, in Timișoara, as protests erupted and faced violent suppression. The crisis escalated when Ceaușescu held a mass rally in Bucharest on December 21 to show popular support. The crowd, however, rebelled against him. Facing danger, Ceaușescu and his wife Elena tried to escape, but the military detained them. A military court tried them swiftly, and their execution followed on December 25, 1989. The Romanian Revolution thus quickly toppled the Communist regime and paved the way for a more democratic government.

Many of Sepetys’s other novels are also works of historical fiction that share similarities with I Must Betray You. Perhaps the most notable is Between Shades of Gray, which also tackles themes of survival and resilience under totalitarian rule. The novel follows a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl who is deported to Siberia during Stalin’s reign and portrays the horrors of Soviet work camps. Another contemporary work of young adult fiction dealing with similar themes and subject matter is Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. The Book Thief features a young protagonist who is also struggling under an authoritarian regime—Nazi Germany in this case—and engaging in acts of rebellion. Over the course of the 20th century, many books were written about communism and the Soviet Union, both fiction and non-fiction. Some of the more notable fictional critiques of communism include George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Meanwhile, the most-cited work of non-fiction about the Soviet Union is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which was partially based on Solzhenitsyn’s personal experiences in Soviet labor camps.