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Title: The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 by J. Arch Getty, Oleg V. Naumov, Benjamin Sher, Oleg, V. Naumov ISBN: 0-300-09403-5 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant
Comment: Dr Getty's study of the Terror is among the most groundbreaking and insightful of the last decade. I believe it is the best book on the Terror yet written. What began as a moderate attempt to clean up the Party in 1933 through controled means turned into violent chaos in mid-1937. The Yezhov years are covered deeply with a great reliance on archives avalible. For the first time the documents themselves can be viewed by the reader. Getty clearly defines the periods of the Terror according to their severity. In 1933 people were purged from the Party but it only ment dismissal and a chance for readdmition. In 1936 things began to get bloody but it was still controled by the elites. The explosion of 1937 with the liquidation of top Soviet Marshals signaled the coming of a full blown bloodbath. This period lasted from the last half of 1937 to the first half of 1938. This was largely directed by the NKVD under Yezhov but Getty stresses Yezhov was ordered by Stalin and the Politburo to conduct arrest and executions of party elites in both the Center and provinces along with mass shootings of social marginals. The Terror was horrible yet more conservative numbers of deaths are given. Elites were the primary victims. Getty's statistics appear to be correct. Millions were not executed but social trama of the Terror was horrid. This work shreds Robert Conquest to pieces...
Rating: 5
Summary: Bolshevik Crimes Exposed
Comment: Unlike other mass murderers, the Bolsheviks left a paper trail detailing their horrific criminal deeds. Naturally, dictator Josef Stalin is prominently cited in the formerly top secret transcripts of the Soviet's Central Committee. Others, however, like his nomenklatura henchmen; Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew and rabid Christian hater; Vyacheslav Molotov; Lavrenti Beria; and Genrikh Yagoda, were just as complicit as him. The historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper put it well, "Great massacres may be commanded by tyrants, but they are imposed by people." The authors conservatively estimate that "1.5 million" Communist Party members were killed during the "Great Terror" purges of the 1930s. The majority were shot to death, others died in the GULAG camps, originally established by the fanatical Bolshevik thug, Vladimir I. Lenin. This riveting story opens by telling the sad tale of one Alexander Yulevich Tivel. It is typical of what happened to many of Marxism's true believers. A hack propagandist for Pravda, Tivel was shot as an "enemy of the people" on March 7, 1937, in Moscow, after a perfunctory trial. He was also a Zionist, who had made the fatal mistake of knowing Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek. Like Tivel, they were all Jews, who were suspected by the Kremlin elite of plotting with its arch rival, the exiled zealot, Lew Davinovich Bronstein, a/k/a Leon Trotsky. The Tivel drama didn't end there. His wife was sent to Siberia and she wasn't freed until 1953. Their young son was placed in an orphanage for being a "member of the family of a traitor of the Motherland." In this book, too, surprisedly, you will find the modern seeds of the dubious "Hate Crime" concept, championed by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). Stalin, in a rant about the putative enemies of his Communist hell hole, is quoted in October, 1937, as saying, "Anyone who by his actions and thoughts-yes, his thoughts-encroaches on the unity of the socialist state, we will destroy them and their kin." I'm sure Schumer, a pompous windbag, will deny the alien-based connection to his legislative scheme. This is an authoritative book that exposes the unspeakable crimes of Stalin's Bolshevik gang against its own party faithful. It should be a sobering lesson to anyone who tends to believe in extremist solutions.
William Hughes, J.D. Baltimore, MD. (Published in the journal of the Social Justice Review, July-August, 2000 issue.)
Rating: 5
Summary: Gives an exceptionally valuable insight into Stalin's purges
Comment: This book is tremendously useful because it gives a hitherto unknown insight into exactly how Stalin and his closest cronies set in motion the purges of the 1930s. The heart of the book consists of around 200 secret Communist Party documents interspersed with commentary from the authors. The archival material suggests very strongly that the path to the terror was not planned meticulously from the start but consisted of a series of false starts and zigzags until Stalin decided in 1937 to crush all resistance to the party's rule. Of particular interest are a couple of documents which show how many members of the inner Politburo demanded stricter punishments for alleged wrong-doers than Stalin did himself. Barring the discovery of Stalin's diary many of the dictator's motives will remain unknown forever but the documents in this book do paint a largely convincing portrait of an unpopular regime in Moscow lurching from crisis to crisis, trying both to stablise the internal situation and also to eliminate the possibility of serious internal resistance. What does come through very clearly is how arbitrary the terror was and how many of those charged with repressing alleged foreign spies and saboteurs were almost guaranteed to be shot themselves. First the Politburo lashed out at the secret police for not doing enough to stamp out centres of Trotskyite resistance and then issued orders demanding the execution and arrest of millions of people across the country. Later the secret police came under fire for allegedly indulging in indiscriminate terror and repressing too many people. I can understand the point of the Kirkus Reviews contributor who doubted the authors' explanation that the Politburo pushed ahead with the purges because they were indeed convinced enemies lay behind every corner and a coup was always possible. A sense of self-preservation and the need to show Stalin they were onside surely did partly explain their enthusiasm for spilling blood. But this is a minor quibble about an otherwise excellent book.
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Title: Stalin's Letters to Molotov: 1925-1936 (Annals of Communism Series) by Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Catherine A. Fitzpatrick ISBN: 0300068611 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Stalinism As a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents by Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Andrei Sokolov, Thomas Hoisington, Steven Shabad ISBN: 0300084803 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest ISBN: 0195071328 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: October, 1991 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 by Marc Jansen, Nikita Petrov ISBN: 0817929029 Publisher: Hoover Inst Pr Pub. Date: 05 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s by Sheila Fitzpatrick ISBN: 0195050010 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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