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A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia

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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 ones 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 Yakovlevs 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.

Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev may be best known as the godfather of perestroika. He was instrumental in formulating the concept of perestroika (restructuring), in persuading Gorbachev to implement perestroika, and in bringing Gorbachev back to perestroika when he vacillated, Hamlet-like, between his liberal and hard-line advisors in the late 1980s. Yakovlev was, in a very real sense, along with Eduard Sheverdnadze, Gorbachev's political conscience.

In A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Yakovlev presents the tragedy of Russia under Lenin and Stalin. He examines in separate chapters how various constituents of the Soviet Union fared under Communism: Political parties other than the Bolsheviks, the peasants, the intelligentsia, the clergy, the military, the numerous non-Russian nationalities, the Jews. All were exploited, when possible, to further the Bolshevik hold on Russia, and executed, exiled, or enslaved when political exploitation was not possible. Yakovlev holds Lenin and Stalin responsible for 60 million deaths. These include peasants that starved as a direct result of the collectivization of agriculture and World War II deaths, many of which were a direct result of Stalin's purge of competent military officers on the eve of the war and the unwarranted trust he placed in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Some have questioned the legitimacy of attributing these deaths to Stalin. Rather than debate that responsibility here, the reader is referred to Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, and Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime.

Yakovlev traces all of the totalitarian acts of terror associated with Stalin's rule to their beginnings under Lenin, demolishing the myth that Stalin somehow perverted the more humane party of Lenin. The book is a somber read, 200 plus pages documenting murders, torture, slave labor in the name of an ideology that is morally, intellectually, and (now, thankfully) financially bankrupt.

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.

Alexander Yakovlev's _A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia_ is essential reading for those interested in better understanding the fundamental nature and broad scope of the Communist Party's criminality from its "counterrevolution" (as Yakovlev refers to it) in 1917 through the end of the Stalin period. Readers unfamiliar with the contours of Soviet history, however, may have trouble following (and appreciating) the author's narrative.

Yakovlev's book is divided into ten short chapters. The first is semi-biographical, reocunting Yakovlev's own position as a major intellectual figure in the USSR and provinding a broad overview of the crimes committed by major Party leaders. Subsequent chapters deal with specific "repressed" groups: abandoned childresn, socialists, the peasantry, priests & nuns, Jews, etc.

The book is particularly important for shedding some light on the nature of the documents contained in Russia's "Presidential Archive," a treasure trove housing immensely valuable materials about the Communist Party that has remained mostly off-limits to non-Russian researchers.

"Impose mass terror immediately." Such was Lenin's direction to officials in Nizhny Novgorod, dated 9 August 1918. "Not a minutes delay..." he continued, "we must take all-out action: mass searches, executions for concealing weapons, mass deportation of Mensheviks and the unreliable." This wasn't the only such order nor, states the author of this historical expose on Soviet Marxism, was it the first. In other words, "Stalinist excesses" (exposed by Khrushchev in his "secret speech"---behind closed doors to the Party) weren't an aberration, but the norm. Lenin was not similarly castigated as that would have called into question the legitimacy of the Soviet regime itself; notwithstanding the author's view that Stalin was simply a student of his homicidal progenitor Lenin. It was the notion that "within the country, the regime couldn't exist without grand political trials and permanent civil war." The "thaw" of Khushchev's years, moreover, didn't put an end to this violence toward the individual (obfuscated, in the Marxist tradition, by baseless communal indictments). Well, so much for the history lesson. You are, I presume, trying to decide whether or not to buy this book, aren't you? I, for one, got a copy because I wanted to see how Mr. Yakovlev (a senior advisor to Gorbachev and "the father of glasnost") viewed the Soviet Era.Just the fact that Mr. Yakovlev was in the audience when Khrushchev made the speech I referred to above, morover, made it worthwhile for me to read this book. But if you've read much on the brutality of the USSR this book is not going to tell you much that's especially new. Mr. Yakovlev presents 238 pages of evidence damning the evils perpetrated by the USSR and Marxism, but the book is a bit laden with political-organization abbreviations and names of victims (prominent individuals that to the casual reader will not be familiar). So while I found it interesting I would hesitate to recommend this treatise to you unless you have read a number of books already on some aspects of Soviet history. It's just hard to absorb the enormity of the numbers involved herein. Some examples: "In the Russian Federation alone, according to incomplete data," Mr Yakovlev states, "the number of people sentenced between 1923 and 1953 total more than 41 million." 41 MILLION! "More than 994,000 Soviet servicemen were sentenced during the war by military tribunals alone, and of this number more than 157,000 were sentenced to be shot." During the month of august 1922, 135,000 of 300,000 domestic letters were opened and examined, and "all 285,000 letters sent abroad had also been censored." 5.5 million died of famine during the civil war and more than 5 million in the 1930s. And such staggering numbers appear every few pages in this book. Soviet history---It's crazier than fiction. Cheers!

Yakovlev was the most high-ranking communist ever to completely denounce communism and the USSR. He was chief of Propoganda and Interior Minister during his lifetime. He Saw documents and items that very few others have ever seen, from the Secret Presidential Archives, Which were not opened in the 1990s. Only a select few, personally chosen, were allowed to even enter the presidential archives. This automatically gives authenticacy to any of Yakovlevs debates and numbers.

Yakovlevs book is a heavily emotional tale, part of his own, and part of the suffering of countless millions under the USSR. He completely denounces the system that he was once part of, and now he says he is trying to help rebuild what he destroyed. His book is a very intresting read, for it is not in boring scholary language,but is in a attractive tone, with emotion and passion, and yet his debates are not ruined either. His numbers of 35 million-60million are likely very accuarate. He likely got 35 million from the documents in the archives that he had acces to, and the 60 million by projecting what documents were lost during the reign before he had acces to the documents.
The tales of Stalin are heavily unknown, by the general public as a whole. Most people know his name, and that he was a communist, but very few know the extent of his crimes and the suffering he caused, and the things set into motion that caused suffering and political dilemas and crisises that went on for the rest of the 20th Century. Yakovlevs book is a truely good book, information wise, and in readabilitie too.

This is one of the best and most important books ever written on the Soviet Union, which is exposed here as a blood-soaked 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 is in a better position to know what happened than anyone else, considering he has been going through the archives for the last ten years. 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 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 clergy were subjected to the most bestial of atrocities: priests, monks and nuns were crucified on the central doors of iconostases, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled with priestly stoles, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were executed in 1918 alone. 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 bloody history of the 20th century to read this book.

In addition to this I would recommend the following:

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois, et al
Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and 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

How can a century of violence come across like reading some horrible bureaucratic list of names and dates? I don't know, but they did it.

I'd read "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn and cried through the whole thing. I was looking for a book that, without the drama and human story, would detail the decisions made and factors considered by Soviet leaders as they embarked on their murderous course. I thought this sounded like just the thing.

Instead, I could barely read a sentence without falling asleep. Names! Of people, organizations, departments. Histories of the people, organizations, departments. I would strain to try to keep them all ordered in my poor brain, thinking maybe they would be important later. Alas, no.

I still haven't found the type of book I'm looking for, one that presents important information in an interesting way. I know! I am so shallow. And maybe just not as smart as all the other reviewers. Oh well.

Yakovlev seems like an incredible person. But the book, not so much.

Without question Alexander Yakovlev is a unique individual: dissident, policy-maker, and truth-teller. He directly participated in and personally witnessed the vastly different eras of the former USSR, from the highest levels. Former Chief of the Propaganda Ministry of the Soviet Union. Later, an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev. Yakovlev is considered to be the founding father of "Glasnost." He was also in the audience behind closed doors to personally hear Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin.

He is the highest ranking Party member to denounce the hypocrisy, murders, incarcerations, and barbarity by leaders of the former USSR upon its own people. (Of course, the former CCCP wasn't the only nation-state that has abused its own citizens. The USA has done plenty of this.) Alexander Yakovlev is one of the very select few who's been allowed into the ultra-secret and restricted Presidential archives in Moscow. Among numerous facts he discovered, were that a total of 41 million Soviet citizens were sent to prisons in the USSR.

This book provides a lot of information about the period of Soviet history from the ascension of the Bolsheviks to Stalin's death in 1953. This information from the Presidential Archives contains voluminous amounts of classified records and documents. Obviously, historians are aware of Stalin's mass murders, psychopathology and lack of conscience. Yet many documents Yakovlev noted were verbatim orders in writing by Lenin. We learn from Lenin's own writings, that he was just as brutal, though perhaps less systematic. Lenin led in turbulent times, before and after the Bolshevik victory. He died peacefully, but soon after. His death brought down any sense of humanity by the person who replaced him, who then air-brushed him out of history during his reign.

Numerous groups of people that were systematically repressed are listed in this book. Again, this isn't a unique phenomenon in history nor is it exclusive to the former Soviet Union.

And intriguing book by an accomplished and interesting man.

Regardless of ideology, I tend to believe that: "The nature of states is to seek power above all."

--Political Theorist, Hans Morganthau

I read Moscow December 25,1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union first. In it Yakovlev is credited with being the major thinker of glasnost and perestroika. As author of this book I found out why he had become so disillusioned with Communism. He was present to witness events that he speaks in detail about. For other incidents where he was not present, he was eventually high enough in Gorbachev's inner circle to access the archives and speak to those who were eyewitnesses. While other reviewers were bored with the statistics (and sometimes I find myself with the same feelings about other books) this is their personal comment. With so much of the USSR archives still unavailable for research and a lot destroyed according to the Moscow December 25 book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia is a critical part of history that will be used for research by historians in the future.

Critics may say, "Prove the charges" but this is just rhetoric from "fellow travelers" who won't believe it even when its proved. They should read the chapter "The Intelligentsia" to see what their own fate would have been had they lived in the USSR. Lenin is exposed as just as much driven by power and brutality as Stalin. Neither had any concerns about the people. One of the greatest human tragedies discussed in the book was the fate of the Russian POWs who returned after WWII. Of course the Allies were guilty of forcing thousands to return when they wanted to stay in the West.

20 years have passed since the USSR died and the generation that experienced communism is rapidly dying off. At least we have some details to review in the future from books like this one. Today we would like to know about the history, culture, daily life of the Maya and other indigenous tribes. Sadly the Spanish and others destroyed the written records and we will never know much. Those who dislike books like this evidently hope for the same fate.