by Robert Conquest
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Product Description
The definitive work on Stalin's purges, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Harrison Salisbury called it "brilliant...not only an odyssey of madness, tragedy, and sadism, but a work of scholarship and literary craftsmanship." And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the former Soviet Union, where it is now considered the definitive account of the period.
When Conquest wrote the original volume, he relied heavily on unofficial sources. With the advent of glasnost, an avalanche of new material became available, and Conquest mined this enormous cache to write, in 1990, a substantially new edition of his classic work, adding enormously to the detail. Both a leading historian and a highly respected poet, Conquest blends profound research with evocative prose, providing not only an authoritative account of Stalin's purges, but also a compelling and eloquent chronicle of one of this century's most tragic events. He provides gripping accounts of everything from the three great "Moscow Trials," to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, life in the labor camps, and many other key matters.
On the fortieth anniversary of the first edition, in the light of further archival releases, and new material published in Moscow and elsewhere, it remains remarkable how many of Conquest's most disturbing conclusions have continued to bear up. This volume, featuring a new preface by Conquest, rounds out the picture of this huge historical tragedy, further establishing the book as the key study of one of the twentieth centurys most lethal, and longest-misunderstood, offenses against humanity.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Valuable Information about the Gulags, Communist Repression, etc., 2008-09-10
Instead of repeating other reviewers, I mostly focus on new information. To begin with, Robert Conquest implicitly rejects the argument that Communism was positive in that it modernized Russia. He comments: "But the old Russia had not been all that backward. It already had been the fourth industrial power before the Revolution." (p. 460). He also upends the myth of the insignificance of Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union in WWII. General Zhukov is quoted as saying that, without it, "victory would have been impossible." (p. xviii).
Conquest provides significant detail about the Katyn massacre (pp. 447-449). Tens of thousands of captive Polish officers and intellectuals were shot in cold blood in the spring of 1940. The author discusses the virtual absence of officers resurfacing after the Nazi-invasion-induced "amnesty" of Gulag Poles in 1941, Stalin's farcical lie about them all having escaped to Manchuria (December 3, 1941), the German revelation about the discovery of the Katyn graves in April 1943, etc. Of course, Katyn is only one location in the former Soviet Union where mass graves containing tens of thousands of victims have subsequently been found (p. 288).
It has been argued that there was no Gulag equivalent to the Nazi death camps--no camps to which admission absolutely guaranteed death. In fact, there were: Novaya Zemlya, for example. (pp. 337-338).
Some revisionists have attempted to downgrade the number of victims of the Gulags into the thousands, based on selected Soviet data. But Soviet archives are rife with falsification. (p. 460). There is no reason to suspect that data relative to the Gulags is any more reliable. (The fact that certain documents refer to essentials such as food is irrelevant. In fact, it is facile to order a certain amount of food and divide it among a large number of prisoners at near-starvation levels for each individual.)
Conquest repeats his minimum estimate of 2,000,000 dead at Kolyma alone. (p. 325). He also refutes the revisionist attempts to downgrade the death toll of the Gulags in general, pointing to multiple interlocking sets of data that put the number of victims of the Soviet system into the tens of millions. (pp. 486-487).
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The definitive story of the Great Purges, 2008-08-22
When the original version of this book was published it illicted skepticism from some (most?) Western scholarly and elitist circles, particularly from those ideologically and politically sympathetic to the Soviet bloc. Considering the sheer extent of the premeditated mass murder it documented, it is to some extent understandable that even the most die-hard Cold-Warriors were sometimes taken aback. Nonetheless, subsequent history and documentation has almost totally reinforced Mr. Conquest's original work, which was itself well-documented. For anyone interested in the Stalinist purges, it remains the basic text with which to begin. It remains a tragedy that the crimes it documents have not received nearly as much attention as the Nazi holocaust, but Mr. Conquest, at least, has done its victims some measure justice.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Terror as Strategy, 2008-08-17
It is, perhaps, an unfortunate aspect of cerebral function that we believe what we see and that which we don't see is proportionately less real. Consequently, we believe the horrors of Hitler's Holocaust. After all, we've seen the pictures. Unfortunately, although the Soviet Empire collapsed like a house of cards, it was never defeated. Hitler was defeated and his atrocities were revealed--graphically--to a shocked world. In that the Soviets weren't defeated their successors have managed to bottle up information--including any extant films--on the even larger Holocaust that was the Lenin/Stalin misrule and the Soviet Union itself.
Fortunately, we have the witness of Solzhenitzin, Pasternak, Conquest and others...but we still don't have the pictures and, much like 'Arbeit macht Frei', 'Pictures make real'. It has therefore been possible for Communists, leftists and liberal sympathizers to deny one of the the most incredible massacres that the world has ever experienced.
Conquest documents the motives and the mechanism behind it. In order to root out opposition and, in particular, to make everyone march in lockstep, Stalin and others kill almost as if their efforts were to fertilize the soil. Property owning farmers [kulaks] are imprisoned and killed causing the next rank of farmers to rise to the top. They are imprisoned and killed and the third tier floats to the top...then they are imprisoned and killed until finally you are left with a terrified basic population lowered to its basic common denominator. These are not the movers, shakers and doers of society. They are sheep for the shearing and Stalin shears them plenty. Granted they are the least productive members of society but that isn't important. Important is that the jump when ordered and ask 'how far' on the way up.
The Lubyanka is a killing chamber and the gulag is stuffed with dying sufferers. The road to Kolyma is paved in bones. Conquest has worked the population figures--the census--and puts the murders at a minimum of 20 million although, some Russians put the count at three times greater. Except to the dead, it hardly matters. It is, after all, just statistics. As I write, Stalin's spiritual successor, the KGB thug, Vladimir Putin, is pushing armored columns deep into Georgia. He means to reconstruct the Soviet Empire on a sea of oil and blood. God help us if we take no action.
Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Chilling, it combats leftist "Holocaust denial" about Stalin's terror, 2008-04-22
Which is more terrifying? Stalin's 1936-38 terror, or Western liberals' inability to recognize it? Updating his original work "The Great Terror" with a vast amount of new data, Conquest scrupulously details and puts into context the purges themselves: the many players and defendants, the shifting political cross-currents, the rounds of trials and arrests.
And he does the same for the many Western observers - intellectuals, writers, journalists, and left activists - who were oblivious to it or actively sought to hush it up, even decades later when there were no longer any shreds of doubt. This is the equivalent of Holocaust denial.
And a Holocaust it was. While left-wing apologists pooh-poohed the numbers of purge deaths as in the thousands, the estimates of those killed politically in the people's progressive utopia are now solidly in the eight figures, with as many as 15 to 20 million arrested and executed, or worked to death in the camps, in the years up until Stalin's death in 1953. As many more died were starved by the Communists in the Ukraine to break the peasantry a few years earlier. Yet most people seem never to have heard of any of this.
In the Terror itself, Stalin and the NKVD prosecuted fictitious espionage, sabotage and subversion charges against millions of people. Those arrested would be tortured until they agreed to confess and implicate others. Most did, and quickly. It wound down only when the NKVD saw that, mathematically, every citizen of the nation would soon be implicated. But it flared up periodically until Stalin's death in 1953.
The purges served several purposes. They transformed the USSR from a dictatorship of the proletariat into Stalin's despotism. They removed most previous party members and high-ranking officials, suppressing alternate notions of what Communism was about, and replaced them with ruthless Stalinists. Those persecuted included those who had been non-Bolshevik leftists, even if they since had conformed; Bolsheviks who had subscribed to Lenin's agricultural compromise delaying collectivization to boost agricultural production; Trotskyites; and finally, Stalinists and the NKVD themselves, for no ostensible reason but merely to terrify and cow.
Stalin meanwhile could blame the country's Bolshevik-destroyed economy on the fictional sabotage "confessed to" in public trials, or to foreign spies. And he could blame the purge's excesses on the NKVD itself.
We see the breakdown of figures and how they were derived: those executed with or without trial, those deported to slave labor camps, those executed in the camps, and those merely worked to death within them. The death rate for those sent to slave labor camps was around 90 percent. There are some camps whose mere existence cannot be confirmed firsthand because no one is known to have survived them to give testimony.
This is an essential part of the anti-Communist canon, certainly on the top shelf. Conquest's work here confirms his original book and shows that its estimates, if off in any way, were too conservative.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
History as warning , 2008-03-07
The Great Terror remains the cornerstone of any serious debate or study on Stalinist paradise on Earth even now , when a lot of new material has been made public ( e.g. S.S. Montefiore , E. Radzinsky etc.) .In spite of all this , the sheer bravery or Mr. Conquest's to stand firm against his too numerous opponents ,all leftists , all , beyond any logical comprehension ,with all the evidence here and now ,still following the ideals of bolshevism and communism regardless of its variations ( e.g. Ex - Yugoslav communism , Castro , all this being regarded as humane !? ), as this psychological phenomena is also well documented ( e.g. infamous saying by ' greats ' like B.Brecht on first ' trials ' : The more innocent they are , the more they deserve to die !? , Sartre , Shaw and a whole legion of 'serious ', professional historians like Webbs , all of them still regarded as the fighters for the soul of humanity . The reasons why for example fascism is so , rightly ,immediately regarded as synonym for the worst barbarity , a sort of the humanity's worst nightmare , while communism is still seen an innocuous , even benign , not worthy a bad remark , let alone a serious criticism , even though it has caused at least twice as many deaths , are also well and openly presented . In short , the starting point for any student of the 20th century barbarism based onThe Great Terror: A Reassessment the infinite trust in the goodness of man !
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