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The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge Of The Thirties

Robert Conquest

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Aug 08, 2015 Nooilforpacifists rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: russian-history

I remember vividly using this book -- or was it the first edition? -- to refute my friends who refused to believe that evil lurked East of the Brandenburg gate and, especially, in Moscow

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Sep 30, 2019 cool breeze rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This was a towering achievement when it was first published in 1968. Piecing together the scope of Stalin’s butchery and genocide from the sparse evidence available at the time was an incredible accomplishment. Conquest’s conclusions have since been confirmed in all but minor details by subsequent developments such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (1973) and the revelations following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist vassal states.

Conquest managed to c This was a towering achievement when it was first published in 1968. Piecing together the scope of Stalin’s butchery and genocide from the sparse evidence available at the time was an incredible accomplishment. Conquest’s conclusions have since been confirmed in all but minor details by subsequent developments such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (1973) and the revelations following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist vassal states.

Conquest managed to compose his exposé despite the massive orchestrated coverup by the Soviet Union, and the denials, excuses and attacks of its Western allies, fellow travellers and apologists. These included Walter Duranty and The New York Times ("All the Fake News That Fits Our Agenda"), who won the 1932 Pulitzer prize for whitewashing Stalin’s murder of millions by deliberate starvation (the Holodomor). As late as 1985, useful idiots and sycophants like Jerry F. Hough and J. Arch Getty were still publishing books saying that Stalin only murdered thousands. The actual numbers were millions tortured and slaughtered and more than ten million shipped to the Gulag.

As Stalin said, "When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's statistics" (Антон Антонов-Овсеенко, Портрет тирана [Portrait of Tyranny])

Unfortunately, Conquest's book has not aged well, beyond getting the facts right before anyone else of note. He knew he was going to be viciously attacked, and devoted much of the book to documenting and proving his conclusions. This now makes for tedious reading. Telling the story could probably be condensed to 100 pages today. Slogging through the 400 additional pages of proof in 2019 is just incredibly tiresome and depressing.

This book deserved to be rated 5 stars from 1968, when it was published, to when its conclusions were beyond dispute, even prophetic, the 1990s. In 2019, it only rates 3 stars as a book on the topic, with a footnote of 5 stars for its place in history. The author’s updated preface and epilogue do not add much beyond a little well-deserved gloating. I compromised by giving it 4 stars. ...more

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