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Title: A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia by A. N. Iakovlev, Anthony Austin, Paul Hollander, Alexander N. Yakovlev ISBN: 0-300-08760-8 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The case against the Evil Empire
Comment: This is one of the best and most important books ever written on the Soviet Union, which is exposed here as a genocidal totalitarian tyranny every bit as nefarious as Hitler's Third Reich. Yakovlev, once a prominent member of the Soviet elite and architect of "perestroika" who is now head of the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, demolishes the revisionist history coming from Gregory L. Freeze, J. Arch Getty, Robert W. Thurston and others. He has been going through the archives and listening to the stories from terror victims for the last ten years. All this makes A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia the most damning indictment of Soviet Communism since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's monumental work of history, The Gulag Archipelago.
Yakovlev confidently states with absolute certainty that the number of people murdered by the Soviet state for political reasons or who perished in camps/gulags or in genocidal state-enforced famines is around 30-35 million - with a total of 60 million dead if you include those who perished during the second world war, in which Stalin is partly responsible for being foolish enough to form a pact with Hitler and paranoid enough to butcher tens of thousands of his military elite, leaving his country open to attack. The litany of sadistic atrocities against the clergy is absolutely hair-raising: priests, monks and nuns being crucified in their own churches, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and other bestial horrors. In one incident, 47 clergymen were shot, axed to death, or drowned. Besides the clergy and military elite, other victims of Soviet Communism include: peasants (many millions), the intelligentsia, returning Soviet POW's, whole ethnic groups (Crimean Taters, Don Cossacks, Chechens, Volga Germans, Kalmyks, etc.), even so-called "Socially Dangerous Children."
Yakovlev also tackles one of the great myths about Soviet Communism: Good Lenin/Bad Stalin. Lenin was no big-hearted idealist concerned for humanity, but a fanatic and a cold-blooded murderer, willing to kill off millions of his fellow countrymen in the name of the "revolution." Yakovlev quotes the murderous orders Lenin issued: "impose mass terror immediately, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who have been getting soldiers, former officers, and so on drunk. Not a minute's delay." "Hang (by all means hang, so people will see) no fewer than 100 known kulaks, fat cats, bloodsuckers." "launch merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards. Suspicious individuals to be locked up in concentration camp outside city." In 1919, Lenin ordered the Cheka (Bolshevik secret police) to execute those who did not show up for work on a particular religious holiday. As Yakovlev shows, Stalin simply picked up where Lenin left off.
I absolutely urge anyone interested in the history of the 20th century to read this book.
In addition to this I would recommend the following:
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis
Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide ands Mass Murder since 1917 by R. J. Rummel
Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First by Mona Charen
Rating: 4
Summary: A grim, vital study of the horror that was Soviet Russia
Comment: I am not sure I can possibly convey the importance of this book and how urgently it needs to be read by almost anyone with an interest in the history of the last century. Actually, I would go further, and turn that last sentence on its ear. This is an indispensable book for those who have little knowledge of or interest in the 20th Century. People need to understand what went on in the Soviet Union between the years 1916 and 1989.
Growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was not at all uncommon, at least in Canada, for one's circle of friends to include Marxist-Leninists ' particularly once you got to University. I actually had a rather close friend who not only adopted this political philosophy, but also actively espoused the cause of Soviet Russia ' to the point of making excuses for Stalin. This made for extremely lively debates. In retrospect, knowing what we now know about communist Russia, I rather think my friend needed at the very least a good thrashing. For it was people like him, and the left-leaning western media, that gave succor to, and in a way legitimized, what we now know was one of the must shocking brutal, tyrannies ever to disgrace our planet.
The subject of the culpability of the western media, fellow travelers and communist sympathizers is covered by Richard Pipes, in 'Russia Under the Bolsheviks'. These people have, in a very real sense, blood on their hands, and I often tremble with rage when I recall the facile and damaging lies that they propagated. Under the noses of these gullible and willfully naïve 'liberal thinkers', 35 million people died, either as the result of political terror or deliberate starvation.
Alexander Yakovlev now reinforces the point with a harrowing, grim collection of essays, 'A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia.' Yakovlev was an advisor to Gorbachev and is now the head of a commission charged with analyzing and cataloging the horrors of Soviet Russia. In my review of Pipes' book (mentioned above), I had occasion to remark that in that book, Lenin came in for the thrashing that he so richly deserved. Lenin has had it easy. When the full horrors of the Stalinist period became known, Marxists and Socialists to a man rushed to point out that Stalin was an anomaly, that he and his regime had nothing to do with the gentle, humane, philosophical Lenin (and, in any event, 'one had to break eggs to make an omlette'). Some people still believe this. Do you? Well here is Yakovlev's trenchant, damning summing up:
'Exponent of mass terror, violence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, class struggle and other inhuman concepts. Organizer of fratricidal Russian civil war and concentration camps, including camps for children. Incessant in his demands for arrests and capital punishment by bullet or rope. Personally responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian citizens. By every norm of international law, posthumously indicted for crimes against humanity.'
Shockingly, Russians (as well and never-say-die communists throughout the world) continue to revere Lenin. This horrifies Yakovlev who notes that 'to this day the country proliferates with monuments to Lenin and streets names after him.' Worse than this, a shockingly large segment of Russian society today believes that Stalin is in need of rehabilitation, that he did nor good than bad for Russia. Stalin has become nothing more than a name to most people in the world. When Saddam Hussein was compared to Stalin, when it was noted that he had actually studied Stalin, this tended to make little impression - because most of the world has forgotten. Men like Conquest, Pipes, Figes and Yakovlev write so that we will NOT forget. Their books should be required reading, because men like Lenin and Stalin NEVER go away, they are always with us and we must be forever vigilant and on our guard that they do not take root again.
Rating: 4
Summary: Boleshivism debunked
Comment: Am important book for Russians, and for all people who doubt the stark reality of the Bolshevik regime. Yakolev asserts at one point that the only true statement that came out of the Stalinist period was that there ws no change in the party from Lenin's time. Stalin, for Yakovlev, was the true student of Lenin, whoose brutality was shown from the very beginning. More, the entire system of Marxist-Leninism was flawed from the start, an untenable ideology doomed to failure. Coming from an insider, despite his ten years in the west as ambassador to Canada, and from the person who oversaw the rehabilitation of political victims under peristroika and after, these comments are damning indeed.
Yakovlev documents the atrocities--to the peasants, the church, the jews, ethnic groups, the inteligensia, to political dissidents, to prisoners of war and saddest of all to children and families of those considered dangerous to the regime. For Yakovlev Russia must purge itself of Bolshevism in order to once again move forward. At times an emotional journey, it nevertheless gives an accurate accounting. Well done.
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