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Title: The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0-19-507132-8 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: October, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Definitive work on one of history's darkest episodes...
Comment: Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, a Reassessment, is they definitive English language work on Stalin's purges. The book has had some criticism from the far left, but Conquest has been largely vindicated by the now open Soviet archives.
This book is largely dispassionate. Conquest resists the urge to excessively moralize. Instead, he treats his subject matter in largely chronological order, with a few diversions for background. The result is a detailed catalog of the horrors of the purges. The text relies on excerpts from the trail transcripts, and these are absolutely chilling taken in context of the result. Each trial is worse than the other. In fact, to some extent the trials are worse because of the sheer routine the purges degenerated intoforced confessions, self-betrayals, they all became commonplace. Society turned against itself, until you were not considered a responsible citizen unless you denounced somebody; turning on your neighbors, friends, even relatives became a method of insuring personal security and survival. This book is 'must' reading for anybody who wants to understand Stalinism and this period of the Soviet Union. The lessons learned should never be forgotten...
Rating: 5
Summary: HISTORY AS SURREALISM
Comment: When I read the first edition of this book back during the Cold War, it was difficult to believe the quality of scholarship and research effort that Conquest demonstrated throughout this book, written while the KGB was still running amok. What most general histories dismissed with a few sentences or paragraphs as "millions died or were imprisoned", Conquest gave us the names, the chronology, and the results of Stalin's paranoid Reign of Terror. Now that the archives have become more accessible, Conquest is able to update his work and further illuminate this darkest period of Russian (and perhaps world) history. ANYTHING written by Conquest is worth reading if you want to understand the workings of 20th century Soviet politics and society.
Rating: 5
Summary: Never Mind, They'll Swallow It
Comment: Reading The Great Terror is an awakening awareness of mind-boggling inhumanity. To say that in the 1930s Stalin snuffed out twenty million of his citizens hardly begins to describe the essential evil of his rule, which caused indescribable suffering for countless millions more, not to mention plunged the world into war for decades.
It's easily forgotten that the October 1917 coup by which the Bolshevik intellegentsia came to power lacked popular support and by 1921 had lost any semblance of representing the proletariat. From its inception, the party of Lenin and Trotsky embraced deceit, violence, and willingness to sacrifice others as a means to power, bringing Hitler later to say that unlike Social Democrats "he could always turn a Communist into a Nazi." Stalin merely took the context of intolerance to its logical extreme, plotting the decimation of his opposition into ever smaller groups, assisted by the very ones that would themselves successively be destroyed by it: Trotskyites, then Rightists, Bukharinites, Zinovievites, and finally the Stalinists themselves. The 1937 Plenum already marked the complete transformation into autocracy.
Key to Stalin's success were his patience and that he never revealed (or tested) the limits of his ruthlessness. Rivals continually underestimated him: Trotskyites supported the disastrous 1930 agricultural collectivisation, miscalculating that he wouldn't dare another repression and the peasants would revolt-- but Stalin did impose an even worse famine two years later, starving an unimaginable 10 million Russians and Ukrainians. Supporters and opponents alike never held him personally responsible: even the Terror itself was called the Yezhovschina. Victims could be persuaded that the Terror was in the interest of Communism not Stalin, and it is to this day unknown whether Stalin himself believed it. His capriciousness and promises of leniency induced even high officials to produce confessions and denunciations, hoping that perhaps one more obscenity committed in his service might restore them to favour.
At first, at least an actual crime and the formality of a show trial were needed. The fringe benefit of Stalin's assassination of Kirov was that other opponents could be executed for it. Convictions relied solely on confessions that were rather blatantly inconsistent and sometimes bizarre. Though brave individuals sometimes recanted at trial, they fell back into line after a short 'recess'. The rare evidence introduced that was actually verifiable was knowingly false: for example, the Copenhagen Hotel Bristol where Sedov had allegedly met had actually been demolished at the time. But full show trials were a luxury reserved for the Party elite. One court report simply read: "No prosecutor. No witnesses. No co-accused. No defender."
The crimes themselves were soon completely fatuous. Article 58 of the Criminal Code outlawed "flight abroad," "lack of faith in the Socialist state," and fascinatingly "suspicion of espionage." Insufficient loyalty to Stalin was fatal. Workers or managers who failed to meet their quotas were convicted of sabotage, as indeed were NKVD investigators for failing to meet their 'arrest quotas'. Doctors were convicted for assassinating Gorky by smoke from bonfires, Jews for spying for Nazi Germany, and clergy for praying. Purges soon reached to the citizenry, and the mere misfortune of being denounced practically guaranteed guilt.
Confessions were wrought by horrible torture. Wives and children of accused were held hostage and often shared their fate. Children under the age of 17 were despatched to NKVD settlements. Overflowing cells built for twelve held a hundred, so that prisoners had to pack down sideways like sardines-- and only in shifts. Most could not withstand round-the-clock beatings for more than a few months and succumbed, although a few exceptional individuals held out.
The horror of the gulag is beyond comprehension. Camps were brutal, soul-destroying, ruled on behalf of guards by hard-core criminals. The journey to the camps was deadly and could last months. Outside work was compulsory until temperatures dropped below -50 *C. Inmates were starved and savaged by epidemics. Perhaps the best thing about them was that one would not be expected to survive more than two years. In Kolymev only three out of every hundred survived. From Novaya Zembla, nobody returned at all.
It's unknown whether the Purges stopped because the courts were overstretched or because the geometric rate of denunciations would soon have implicated the entire population. Fully 5% of the population had been arrested, while 7 million people languished in camps. Of the original partisans and Bolsheviks no-one at all remained. The Terror machinery nonetheless continued at a more controlled pitch, and the gulag population would grow to 12 million at Stalin's death in 1953. Soviet science, technology, and the military were robbed of their best people. The cumulative psychological effect of the Terror nightmare on generations of Soviets is unimaginable.
Unfortunately, the West generally left these citizens to their fate. Driven by Communist idealism, foreign correspondents ignored, glossed over, or simply flat-out lied about the show trials. Jean-Paul Sartre and other intellectuals still denied the existence of the gulag long after its evidence was undeniable. A French literary journal called Victor Kravchenko's account of the camps a lie. The New York Times' Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer prize for his Stalin apologia.
The Left never let facts get in the way of an attractive ideology, and never understood that "not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are deduced from a political theory, rather than vice versa." That neither Stalin, nor his ideology, have ever been fully held accountable is maddening and a disgrace to the memory of his victims.
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Title: The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0195051807 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: November, 1987 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Stalin: Breaker of Nations by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0140169539 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0393320863 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Gulag : A History by Anne Applebaum ISBN: 0767900561 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0060007761 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 22 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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