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The Great Terror: A Reassessment 40th anniversary Edition

by Robert Conquest (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 81 ratings
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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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  1. ISBN-10
    0195317009
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0195317008
  3. Edition
    40th anniversary
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press, U.S.A.
  5. Publication date
    November 15, 2007
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    9.16 x 1.52 x 6.23 inches
  8. Print length
    608 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"It's hard to overestimate the impact that Robert Conquest's extraordinary study had on the West's perceptions of Soviet history. Using rare Soviet materials, some published during the Khrushchev thaw, others in self-published samizdat format, the British historian put together an authoritative chronicle of Stalin's murderous reign. Western communists and fellow travelers dismissed the book as propaganda. But when Soviet archives were partially opened in 1991, Conquest's estimates of 700,000 "legal" executions during 1937-38 -- and of the total number of other deaths thanks to the Soviet terror campaigns ("hardly lower than some fifteen million") -- were proven chillingly accurate." -- Owen Matthews, N/A, Wall Street Journal

"Anthony Powell once wrote of Robert Conquest that he had a 'capacity for taking enormous pains in relation to any enterprise in hand.' It is beyond dispute that, forty years after the publication of The Great Terror, this judgment requires no reassessment."--Michael Weiss, The New Criterion

"The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn."--Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal

Book Description

A special anniversary edition of Robert Conquest's classic account of Stalin's purges, one of the most horrible events of the twentieth century

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press, U.S.A.; 40th anniversary edition (November 15, 2007)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 608 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195317009
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195317008
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1380L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.89 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.16 x 1.52 x 6.23 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 81 ratings

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
81 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Susan F. Falknor
5.0 out of 5 stars Hey, WWII TV Documentaries! How About Attention To Stalin's Horrors, As Well as Hitler's?
Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2015
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It is very much worth while to read this "old" book (2008)--since it is the most readable and authoritative shifting of evidence as it became more available, decade by decade, ask the "Iron Curtain" rusted from within. Robert Conquest was a great hero of the Cold War, who died August 3, 2015. The weapons he wielded were exacting research and a mastery of expression that marked his many works of poetry, fiction, history, and politics.

In the World War II years, some idealistic Americans found themselves "mugged by reality" and came to grasp the nature of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, more people did. George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, as well as Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago became touchstones. But do Americans know much about it now?

Today, History Channel-type documentaries frequently cover the home-front abuses of Hitler’s Nazis (Jews, Gypsies, or churchmen); but there is very little portrayal of the malevolence of Stalin’s regime held for ordinary Russians. The slogan “Never Forget” evokes Jews under Hitler, not the deaths of at least 15 million Russians during Stalin’s Terror.

The "darkness at noon"-type subject matter makes the book a bit unsettling, but it is highly readable and well worth the time.
38 people found this helpful
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James Tomkinson
5.0 out of 5 stars What everyone should realize about the "Russian culture"
Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2023
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This book may sometimes have a bit too many stories where I got lost in all the persons reported on, but then Stalin really did "slash and burn" through all his experienced personnel. Some truly horrifying repetitive events that included torture, summary executions, and sometimes no show-trials when it wasn't convenient or too time consuming. After all, Stalin wanted *anyone* who could potentially challenge him dead.

When I worked at an investment bank, word was "bottom 5% performers are fired around Christmastime". CEO Stalin would have fired the *top* 20% -- every year. Crazy and horrifying, how he manipulated the jaws of annihilation, killing millions *between* the Red Famine years and leading up to WW2. Hitler must have though this would be an easy chore once he started his attack on a nation that had only one experienced leader left.

So when you count the deaths from the Red Famine (Ukraine and Caucuses) during collectivization ('22-'23), the Great Terror ('36-'39) and the cannon fodder he through at the Nazi invaders, Stalin put Hitler to shame in terms of people killed. Yet in the west it's barely discussed compared to the Holocaust, which was also a horrible event with people purposely ignorant until the last moments.

There is almost a drum-roll execution and death-camp tally at the conclusion, which I won't spoil.

The book underscore why we must stand up to tyranny, and why it's such a difficult task. This updated version includes much additional research post-Glasnost, when the USSR archives were unsealed.
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Ron L
4.0 out of 5 stars Difficult subject, well written
Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2018
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In late 1918 Schumpeter, (quoted in “Prophet of Innovation” – McCraw) discussed the Bolshevik triumph in Russia with his companions: ‘Marxism would have a practical test’. “Weber replied that the result was likely to be catastrophic, because the Bolsheviks were so brutal”. No one offered any disagreement, and Weber, after more discussion, posited: “A laboratory heaped with human corpses!” (pg. 94).
Precisely. Lenin, and then Stalin produced exactly that outcome. Followed by Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kims. Those Communist dictators (and there are no Communist rulers who are not dictators) who haven’t managed to murder most of their population are doing their best to drive them to, or keep them in poverty. Communism is a failure everywhere and every time it has been ‘enforced’ (it would not exist without ‘enforcement’).
Conquest does a good job on a difficult subject, but even with his efforts, this is not an easy read. We are treated, on turning nearly every page, with sub-human viciousness, not to say bestiality, which pretty much defines the ‘experiments’ in Communist systems, whether they are attempted in Eur-Asia, the Far East, or the West; every one of them becomes a murder factory to some extent.
Tony Judt, who is nobody’s idea of a “capitalist tool”, states in “Post War” (pg 561): “In light of twentieth-century history the state was beginning to look less like a solution than the problems, and not only or even primarily for economic reasons. What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing”. Just so; there has yet to be a counter example. The twenty-first century Communists have proven to be, in percentage, as deadly or worse.
I did find it surprising that, early on, there existed some slight opposition to Stalin and that Stalin spent even a minute of his time making any attempt at all to provide some scintilla of legal justification for his mass-murders. But it quickly becomes clear that the opposition promptly ‘disappeared’ and whatever legal strictures were supposed to limit such murderous thuggery were then either ignored or changed by fiat. Any fantasy of a civilized USSR government is shown to be just that: A fantasy. My surprise is itself not surprising; such opposition was fleeting; worthless in the general murderous progression.
Conquest guides us through the entire outrageous process, from scurrilous ‘accusation’, through arrest, then what is claimed to be ‘trial’, often enough resulting in an immediate bullet to the head. If you were ‘fortunate’ enough, you are jailed but with a good chance of a slow death there of starvation or thuggery. Or perhaps sent to the camps where you had a good chance of dying in transport, only to arrive and find circumstances as likely to kill you at your destination. Again, like the accusation and arrest, the cause of your death was as random, but much more likely, as getting hit by lightning; a huge number more died in the Terror than ever died by lightning. And a shot to the head may well have been the most humane result; I’ll admit to skimming over some of the descriptions of torture.
Chapter 12, “The Great Trial”, should be an embarrassment not only to those in the West who were on-site observers, but to those who read such blatant nonsense and continued to fantasize that Communism was (and is) something other than the murderous thuggery it has always been; Stalin “won” the PR campaign because the “useful idiots” were only too happy to lie to themselves and others.
There is no lack of reliable literature on the subject: Pipes – “The Russian Revolution”, and “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime”, Applebaum – “Gulag: A History”. Even that apologist Figes - “A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924”. And many, many more. Most all are authoritative, all are well supplied with footnotes and bibliographies but we still find pathetic apologists, hoping to salvage some gloss of decency for the horror of Communism, often claiming Conquest’s victim counts are wrong, and they do so by citing ‘new’ data, as if being ‘new’ were to automatically make it more accurate than what Conquest cites.
It doesn’t. There is no reason to believe the ‘new’ numbers haven’t been equally fudged by other apologists, and the whole attempt stinks to high heaven: It’s as if, by citing some ‘new’ account claiming Hitler only directly murdered 5 million innocent people rather than 6 million, he is somehow less of a monster.
We are lead through the final rounds of the horror, some bureaus purged several times over, until the incoming managers must have known that they were handed their death warrants; foreigners murdered in Russia, Russians murdered in foreign countries, the youth league terrorized into a ‘Stalinjugend’ (sic), until even Stalin realizes the inefficiency of it, never finding the least concern for the brutality of it. ‘The banality of evil’ was rarely so evident
Conquest spends a good bit of the last chapter discussing the apologists of the time and attempting to explain the (sometimes admitted) denial of plain and obvious facts; he is far more generous than, for instance, those exposing Hitler’s supporters would be. The fantasies and lies of the Webbs, J-P.Sarte, Davies, Owen Lattimore, GBS, Durante, the French Communist press and more get a look lacking in deserved acrimony.
The last several pages make it clear that Stalin’s bestiality were built into Communism from the start, and the attempts to ‘de-Stalinize’ while still being the USSR could only be cosmetic.
Even now, well into the twenty-first century, you’re left wondering how long it will take for Russia to somehow outgrow that horrible, maiming disease it suffered for more than 70 years.
A difficult but worthwhile read.
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Top reviews from other countries

Convenience
5.0 out of 5 stars An Indispensable History of the Great Terror
Reviewed in Canada on August 1, 2016
Verified Purchase
Review of the Title: The book is excellent. A must read for anyone interested in the history of the Soviet Union. Conquest sometimes uses unconventional sources (such as works of fiction), but this was necessary given the almost total censorship within the Soviet Union. His writing is often difficult to follow, especially given that he adds commentary from his reassessment decades later, without clearly differentiating it from the earlier text. Despite the difficulty, it is worth following, as it is the best history of the Great Terror from that time period.

Review of Physical Book: Very good quality - I couldn't tell that it was not new. Delivered on time. I am completely satisfied.
3 people found this helpful
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