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The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939

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This book is tremendously useful because it gives a hitherto unknown insight into exactly how Stalin and his closest cronies set in motion the purges of the 1930s. The heart of the book consists of around 200 secret Communist Party documents interspersed with commentary from the authors. The archival material suggests very strongly that the path to the terror was not planned meticulously from the start but consisted of a series of false starts and zigzags until Stalin decided in 1937 to crush all resistance to the party's rule. Of particular interest are a couple of documents which show how many members of the inner Politburo demanded stricter punishments for alleged wrong-doers than Stalin did himself. Barring the discovery of Stalin's diary many of the dictator's motives will remain unknown forever but the documents in this book do paint a largely convincing portrait of an unpopular regime in Moscow lurching from crisis to crisis, trying both to stablise the internal situation and also to eliminate the possibility of serious internal resistance. What does come through very clearly is how arbitrary the terror was and how many of those charged with repressing alleged foreign spies and saboteurs were almost guaranteed to be shot themselves. First the Politburo lashed out at the secret police for not doing enough to stamp out centres of Trotskyite resistance and then issued orders demanding the execution and arrest of millions of people across the country. Later the secret police came under fire for allegedly indulging in indiscriminate terror and repressing too many people. I can understand the point of the Kirkus Reviews contributor who doubted the authors' explanation that the Politburo pushed ahead with the purges because they were indeed convinced enemies lay behind every corner and a coup was always possible. A sense of self-preservation and the need to show Stalin they were onside surely did partly explain their enthusiasm for spilling blood. But this is a minor quibble about an otherwise excellent book.

I liked the book because it is the first time I was able to read the Kremlin archives. Being a Russian origin, I would rather read this book in Russian. But I could not. Yes, it is said that archives are open in Russia now, however when I asked my parents to look for this book in St-Petersburg, Russia they were not able to find it and the booksellers never heard about this title. I liked how documents are organized in the book by years and by relevance to the events. The book is logical with the interesting comments by the authors that fill gaps created by the dry language of the protocols and memos. This book helped me understand the motives and evolution of Stalin. It is based on facts and you can not argue with them. If you are looking for the answers like me this book is definitely worth reading However, I think you need to be familiar with a subject.

Dr Getty's study of the Terror is among the most groundbreaking and insightful of the last decade. I believe it is the best book on the Terror yet written. What began as a moderate attempt to clean up the Party in 1933 through controled means turned into violent chaos in mid-1937. The Yezhov years are covered deeply with a great reliance on archives avalible. For the first time the documents themselves can be viewed by the reader. Getty clearly defines the periods of the Terror according to their severity. In 1933 people were purged from the Party but it only ment dismissal and a chance for readdmition. In 1936 things began to get bloody but it was still controled by the elites. The explosion of 1937 with the liquidation of top Soviet Marshals signaled the coming of a full blown bloodbath. This period lasted from the last half of 1937 to the first half of 1938. This was largely directed by the NKVD under Yezhov but Getty stresses Yezhov was ordered by Stalin and the Politburo to conduct arrest and executions of party elites in both the Center and provinces along with mass shootings of social marginals. The Terror was horrible yet more conservative numbers of deaths are given. Elites were the primary victims. Getty's statistics appear to be correct. Millions were not executed but social trama of the Terror was horrid. This work shreds Robert Conquest to pieces...

Probably the single most spectacular thing about this book is Bukharin's incredible personal letter to Stalin on the eve of Bukharin's execution in 1937. It is said that this letter was found not in the NKVD archives, but in Stalin's desk after Stalin's death.

When I read Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" . . . I admired his horrific imaginative creation of the mindset of a character equivalent to Bukharin.

Having now read Bukharin's real-life letter, I can only shake my head at how "truth really is stranger than fiction".

It's simply too much.

This work is based on archives that have been opened in Russia on the old Soviet Union since the fall of Communism. It provides a fascinating glimpse of policy-making on the part of Stalin and the eventual liquidation of almost all of the Old Bolsheviks. It is truly as Wolfgang Leonard said -- the revolution devours its children. Only in this instance it also devoured the leaders.

The authors present their material in the form of actual speeches and documents dealing with high-level individuals in the 1930s. They do not spend much time on the tragedy that Stalin murdered from 17 to 28 million people in the Soviet Union from 1920 to 1945, but specifically target his elimination of all those who brought him to power. This phenomenon is well understood by historians -- Ibn Saud did it to the Wahhabis that fought for him, Hitler crushed the SA leadership & moved their manpower into the Wehrmacht, and Stalin extirpated the Bolsheviks.

What is interesting here is how Stalin was able to accomplish this with the complicit approval of those "about to die" and with confessions that beggared the most fertile imagination. As history has proven to us, there was NO movement against Stalin in the 30s (not even in the US), and the trials were all obscene rituals in falsehoods. So how did this happen?

Well, one point not brought out in this book (maybe in the next one) is that Jews made up an absolute majority of the Old Bolsheviks and Stalin was certainly an anti-semite. Literally the only Jew to survive was Lazar Kaganovich -- Stalin even imprisoned Molotov's Jewish wife and forced Molotov to divorce her. But the terror went far further than that.

The authors clearly point out that the Old Bolsheviks believed in their ideology and policies. Since their policies COULD NOT BE IN ERROR, the only possibility when they failed was that traitorous forces must have sabotaged their efforts. Even more, the correctness of the party line prevented them from criticizing the party or its supreme leadership -- much like a bishop cannot hold the Pope to have committed horrible errors. And above all, they wanted to remain in the party (the womb?) at all costs -- even if it cost them their lives. So they confessed to imaginary crimes so they could remain true to socialism and the party line. Confessions were a ritual to gain acceptance -- even if that acceptance could only be in death.

What alternatives were present for Stalin to understand the situation? One way would be to understand it as a consequence of faulty policies. That was, of course, impossible. Everything Stalin and his cohorts believed from their background, experience and education convinced them that they were following the "correct" (read politically correct) solution to every situation. Did they not come to power by believing that? Did not social history validate them? It was genuinely impossible for Stalin and his supporters to believe that their policies and ideology were wrong. Therefore, the problems must have been externally created. Those who were against him (sometimes personally), against social progress, and wrecking his initiatives were responsible, at fault, and unpatriotic. There was simply no other possibility. After all, Stalin's policies were correct and were being implemented by the "right" people. If the people didn't know what was good for them, well, they would have to be educated or eliminated.

The terror was magnified by the simple difficulty of adhering to the party line since it often changed and was sometimes difficult to divine due to mixed signals. Excessive actions following party guidance to ingratiate oneself to the leadership was as dangerous as opposing the party (other than living a little longer.) Yagoda and Yezhov were certainly good examples of that. So there is much to learn here.

One of the other reviewers took the opportunity this book presents to go off on a rant against ex-President Bush. Frankly, that's the wrong person. If one wishes to apply this book's lessons to the current day, look to those people who follow some ideology to an extreme extent and admit no possible error in the policies of that ideology. Bush could and did admit to errors and mistakes, although he certainly did not castigate himself sufficiently to appease far-left fanatics. So who are those who can't make mistakes? Who directed the Nazis to Jewish property so they could seize it but admits to no wrongdoing? Who puts an individual who holds dual citizenship in as chief of staff for the White House? Who gives billions to Acorn so they can better control the voting? Who spends most of his time campaigning to move the US to a European-style socialist state? Who brooks no treason in that campaign, categorizing anyone who opposes him as stupid, clinging to his God, his guns (and his freedom?) Take my sixth paragraph above (the one starting with "What alternatives" and substitute Obama's name for Stalin's and change the verbs to the present tense. The paragraph is directly applicable today.

As I said, there is much to learn here.

I recommend this book to all, and if the reader is not sufficiently familiar with the players in the Soviet Union at the time, I highly recommend more reading. This is simply too important to ignore. We need to learn from history, not ignore it.

I'm probably the only person in continental North America to have not only read this book, but feels it is important to understanding President George W Bush's administration.

Researchers Getty and Naumov have gone through previously closed archives of Soviet documents, and have put together an invaluable survey of the history of the Stalin era purges of the Soviet Communist Party. What is wholly amazing is that the highest levels of the Party, in secret and closed sessions, used EXACTLY the same language denouncing each other as 'Trotskites,' 'Wreckers,' 'Rightwing Opportunists,' et al--the same ridiculous charges applied to the victims of the notorious 'Show Trials.'

The universal use of this language, as pointed out by Getty and Naumov, shows two things. First, the long held belief in the west of a potential 'liberal' opposition to the Stalinist purges (of Kirov, et al) is just wishful thinking: Not only is there NO evidence of any opposition to the idea that the 1930s Soviet Union was a awash in wild conspiracies, even those ACCUSED of being part of the 'conspiracy' agree that the imposible conspiracies existed. And second, as silly as it appears from the viewpoint of 21st century Americans (my viewpoint, because that is who I am), the Soviet leadership GENUINELY believed their own impossible rhetoric.

What does that have to do with President Bush? The old argument of 'no one can be THAT dumb' is not true, because (in the final analysis) they really ARE that dumb. When Alberto Gonzales was FINALLY forced from the office of US Attorney General, after a reign universally condemned as both grossly corrupt and incompetent, George Bush strongly defended his friend, saying a 'good man' had been unfairly hounded from office--------a stance that can only be charitably described as 'delusional,' if only after the fierce hearings with Senators Schumer and Spector.

Or what about the prison camp in Guantanamo, where 774 'enemy combatants' who were the 'worst of the worst' have been housed? These men were supposedly so bad, they could only be flown bound, gagged, blind folded, and ear muffs preventing them from hearing anything. The Bush administration insisted these unrepentant 'terrorists' if given the chance, would chew through wiring in an effort to crash the plane they were on....Seven years later, over 400 havge been released with no charges, and what? TWO have been actually convicted of anything.

And the now infamous 935 'lies' that the Bush administration is to have told, all in an effort to market the invasion of Iraq to the American people. There can be no dispute that evey one of those 935 statements were objectively incorrect. However, was the President 'lying'? Getty and Naumov's exhastive work on the self-delusional nature of Stalin's Soviet Union strongly suggests that the truth behind George W. Bush is even worse than he 'lied.' In the immortal words of Seinfeld's George Costanza: 'It's not a lie, if you believe it.'

America would be a better and stronger nation today, if only George W. Bush was a liar. Unfortunately, the President--along with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Mukasey THE BEAT GOES ON--are wholly able to go on fooling themselves. Much like Josef Stalin and his apparchnikis, President Bush is on a mission from god (to coin a phrase), where the ends justify the means--and eventually, be it a bastardized version of Marx's motion of history or a twisted neo-Old Testament version of Judeo-Christian spiritualism--everything will come out in the wash...and our eyes will be opened, and we the people will discover they were in fact right all along!

Any day now...Some day....Just you wait....Hold on, it's coming.....

Unlike other mass murderers, the Bolsheviks left a paper trail detailing their horrific criminal deeds. Naturally, dictator Josef Stalin is prominently cited in the formerly top secret transcripts of the Soviet's Central Committee. Others, however, like his nomenklatura henchmen; Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew and rabid Christian hater; Vyacheslav Molotov; Lavrenti Beria; and Genrikh Yagoda, were just as complicit as him. The historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper put it well, "Great massacres may be commanded by tyrants, but they are imposed by people." The authors conservatively estimate that "1.5 million" Communist Party members were killed during the "Great Terror" purges of the 1930s. The majority were shot to death, others died in the GULAG camps, originally established by the fanatical Bolshevik thug, Vladimir I. Lenin. This riveting story opens by telling the sad tale of one Alexander Yulevich Tivel. It is typical of what happened to many of Marxism's true believers. A hack propagandist for Pravda, Tivel was shot as an "enemy of the people" on March 7, 1937, in Moscow, after a perfunctory trial. He was also a Zionist, who had made the fatal mistake of knowing Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek. Like Tivel, they were all Jews, who were suspected by the Kremlin elite of plotting with its arch rival, the exiled zealot, Lew Davinovich Bronstein, a/k/a Leon Trotsky. The Tivel drama didn't end there. His wife was sent to Siberia and she wasn't freed until 1953. Their young son was placed in an orphanage for being a "member of the family of a traitor of the Motherland." In this book, too, surprisedly, you will find the modern seeds of the dubious "Hate Crime" concept, championed by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). Stalin, in a rant about the putative enemies of his Communist hell hole, is quoted in October, 1937, as saying, "Anyone who by his actions and thoughts-yes, his thoughts-encroaches on the unity of the socialist state, we will destroy them and their kin." I'm sure Schumer, a pompous windbag, will deny the alien-based connection to his legislative scheme. This is an authoritative book that exposes the unspeakable crimes of Stalin's Bolshevik gang against its own party faithful. It should be a sobering lesson to anyone who tends to believe in extremist solutions.

William Hughes, J.D. Baltimore, MD. (Published in the journal of the Social Justice Review, July-August, 2000 issue.)

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