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The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties

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One of the astonishing things about the opening of the Soviet Archives is just how accurate Robert Conquest's account of Stalin's purges and the horrors of the GULag system of slave labor and mass murder.

Conquest put out a "Reassessment" in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union wherein even he states his own surprise at how accurate his sources had been in the 1960s when all he had to work from were books by the few who had survived and managed to flee West and write books as well as interviews with survivors and that treasure trove of knowledge about the Soviet Union, the "Samizdat", the underground printing movement that circulated throughout the post-Stalin period and which revealed the truth about many, many things the regime tried to keep secret.

The "Reassessment" is an almost exactly duplicate of this, original version. The only substantial difference is that, in this version, a separate chapter was given to ennumerating Stalin's victims. In the new edition, Conquest eliminates that chapter and subsumes it into another. Thus where the statistical information on Stalin's victims was once easily accessisible, it's now burried in the text. Why, exactly, Conquest chose to do this is beyond me.

he should have stuck with making the few corrections, almost always minor, that the opening of the archives revealed. But publishers like repackaging "old" books: the money's already invested in the it, thus with no new advance to the author, repackaging a 30 or 40 year old book is very profitable. No wonder the publisher wanted some word to imply an "improved" book rather than a simple reprint noting the largely cosmetic changes in the text.

So, if you can, try to grab a copy of this version. You can always read the other one to compare and, I believe you'll see that the title "Reassessment" is unwarranted, or, at least overrated.

This book was written before the fall of the Soviet Union. Conquest is a well known Russian historian and writes a well researched book, for the sources that were available to him at the time. Since the fall, he has updated his work with A Reassessment. Don't read the outdated infor in this book, check out the Reassessed version.