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"When you read Conquest, you feel him very close to us. He writes with pain about the sufferings of the Russian people under the heel of despotism.''-"Literaturnaya Gazete," Moscow
"A very important book. No one has written about Stalin's terror so deeply."-Milovan Djilas
"A very important book. No one has written about Stalin's terror so deeply."-Milovan Djilas
Book Description
First publiished in 1968 to universal critical acclaim, this definitive account of Stalin's Terror is reissued with a new introduction which revists the book in light of glasnost.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When Lenin died in 1924, he final testament was hushed up. Why? Because he had left the 'Party' to Trotsky and Zinioviev, and told them Stalin was not to be trusted. But by now Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and all the Bureaucracy/Apparatchiks were indebted to him for their positions. With the cunning of a weasel he was able to play the Left (Trotsky) against the Right (Zinoviev and Kamenev) and then eliminate the them both. He then eliminated those in the Center and the Old Bolsheviks (members of the party prior to October 1917).
He then systematically eliminated anyone who might become a danger to him or raise a hand against him. The purpose of the Great Terror was to 'cower' everyone. When your afraid to talk to your own children for fear of exposure, your not thinking about overthrowing the government, your hoping not to be noticed. Stalin then was able to 'create' an autocracy where all great and wonderful things emanated from the Leader (him). Stalin was able to dictate the 'history' of the CPSU, the Revolution and Soviet Russia, where he was all knowing and powerful. (That he had might have been an agent of the Tsar's Okhrana, had been a minor player in the Revolution, and his bumbling during the Polish-Soviet War in 1920 cost the loss of Lvov and Warsaw was easily passed over.)
For anyone who wants to know the extent of the "Purge" and what went on during the three Great Trials, this is the answer to all your questions. Conquest does a fabulous job of explaining who was, what was what, and what happened to whom. The dialogue from the trials is alone worth reading the book for. In one case a traitor was accused of meeting foreign spies at a hotel that had been torn down ten years before, and another had a man flying to a city whose airport had been closed for six months during the winter when he flew in.
Well worth the time and effort to read (500+ of densely packed pages).
Zeev BM Halevi
He then systematically eliminated anyone who might become a danger to him or raise a hand against him. The purpose of the Great Terror was to 'cower' everyone. When your afraid to talk to your own children for fear of exposure, your not thinking about overthrowing the government, your hoping not to be noticed. Stalin then was able to 'create' an autocracy where all great and wonderful things emanated from the Leader (him). Stalin was able to dictate the 'history' of the CPSU, the Revolution and Soviet Russia, where he was all knowing and powerful. (That he had might have been an agent of the Tsar's Okhrana, had been a minor player in the Revolution, and his bumbling during the Polish-Soviet War in 1920 cost the loss of Lvov and Warsaw was easily passed over.)
For anyone who wants to know the extent of the "Purge" and what went on during the three Great Trials, this is the answer to all your questions. Conquest does a fabulous job of explaining who was, what was what, and what happened to whom. The dialogue from the trials is alone worth reading the book for. In one case a traitor was accused of meeting foreign spies at a hotel that had been torn down ten years before, and another had a man flying to a city whose airport had been closed for six months during the winter when he flew in.
Well worth the time and effort to read (500+ of densely packed pages).
Zeev BM Halevi
10 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A totally scary book!
But is it perverse of me to be have been found giggling during some memorably darker passages of Conquest's famous tome? If the Great Terror wasn't such a mounumental disaster that fell upon both citizen and officialdom and of such tragic proportions it would have made a brilliant synopsis for a 'Keystone Cops' caper.
The mind cannot comprehend the awfulness that was life during the 1930's in Russia; when perpetrators became victims and victims became martyrs and families of perpetrators, victims and martyrs became victims and villains at once themselves.
The many twists and turns of Stalin's paranoic rule become confusing admist the maze of sub-plots and sub-sub plots, but Conquest reminds us often of the stories of the ghosts that haunt this masterful book; and so that we need to worry little if we confuse Bukharin with Zarkov, Beria with Yagoda or Yezhov with Rykov. Suffice to say, it is simply the awfulness of the Great Terror and the banality of the oppression within a totalitarian society that concern us most. The almost tragic-comedy of those revolting perpetrators, whose existence straddled every stratum of the regime and who in turn were dragged off to have great horrors inflicted on them in return for their 'confessions' is simply awe-inspiring and almost unbelievable in its scope and reach.
My only criticism would be that Kruschev's role in all this fine mess was still as mysterious to me at the end of this book as it was at the beginning.
A magnificent education.
But is it perverse of me to be have been found giggling during some memorably darker passages of Conquest's famous tome? If the Great Terror wasn't such a mounumental disaster that fell upon both citizen and officialdom and of such tragic proportions it would have made a brilliant synopsis for a 'Keystone Cops' caper.
The mind cannot comprehend the awfulness that was life during the 1930's in Russia; when perpetrators became victims and victims became martyrs and families of perpetrators, victims and martyrs became victims and villains at once themselves.
The many twists and turns of Stalin's paranoic rule become confusing admist the maze of sub-plots and sub-sub plots, but Conquest reminds us often of the stories of the ghosts that haunt this masterful book; and so that we need to worry little if we confuse Bukharin with Zarkov, Beria with Yagoda or Yezhov with Rykov. Suffice to say, it is simply the awfulness of the Great Terror and the banality of the oppression within a totalitarian society that concern us most. The almost tragic-comedy of those revolting perpetrators, whose existence straddled every stratum of the regime and who in turn were dragged off to have great horrors inflicted on them in return for their 'confessions' is simply awe-inspiring and almost unbelievable in its scope and reach.
My only criticism would be that Kruschev's role in all this fine mess was still as mysterious to me at the end of this book as it was at the beginning.
A magnificent education.
15 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a story that needs to be told. Conquest masterfully reviews all the evidence on the famines of the 30's in the Soviet Union, as well as details the complicity of journalists and governments in the free world to deny this holocaust. There are tons of material on the tragedies inflicted on the world by the Nazis, but these tragedies pale in the face of the genocides inflicted by the communist regimes of Stalin and Mao. Germans have made admirable efforts to acknowledge their dark history, but Russia and China seem to be pleased to continue the greatest cover-up of genocide in history.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A great liar
Veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College said of Conquest, "He's terrible at doing research," and, "He misuses sources, he twists everything. Read more
Published 9 months ago by William Podmore
A New Look at the Soviet Union in the 1930's
Josef Stalin, who died 5 March 1953, bears much of the reponsibility for the initiation and conduct of the Great Terror, or Purge ('Chistka' in Russian). Read more
Published 15 months ago by ken
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