Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stalin's Purges: Numbers Alone Do Not Tell the Story, December 6, 2003
This review is from: Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Hardcover)
When the Second World War was over in 1945, First Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin seemed to be at a personal peak of power. Despite monumental losses of dead Russian soldiers and civilians, Stalin had led Russia to a victory over Hitler and National Socialism that left him in control not only in Russia but of all of Eastern Europe as well. Further, because of his earlier purges in the late 30's, there was no one left to challenge him either within the Communist party or outside it. Yet, in STALIN'S LAST CRIME, Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov picture a Stalin who, by the time of his death in 1953, was far from the omnipotent ruler that most Russians assumed he was. Brent and Naumov present Stalin as a man who could not change to match changing times. When the war in Europe was over, Russia was not the insular country it had been just ten years earlier. An increasing number of Russians had an equally increasing contact with Western, and hence, democratic ideas and values. The horrors of the war reaffirmed in the collected minds of Russians of the need for a legitimate government that followed its rule of law. The once all consuming fear of Stalin had diluted to the point where some of his less visionary peers would dare to contemplate in the pages of PRAVDA no less of who would follow Stalin once he was dead. Finally, there was Stalin's health, which by the late 1940's had regressed to the point that his Politburo comrades might legitimately wonder about the line of succession. Stalin took note of all this and was determined to turn back the clock to 1937 when he could purge millions of his countrymen merely by snapping his fingers. But by 1949, he could not do so. He needed more, and the so-called plot of the Jewish doctors allowed him to crank up the old machinery that would spin out huge nets to catch anyone whom Stalin suspected needed killing. Much of the first half of STALIN'S LAST CRIME is a minute examination of the death of a party comrade, A. A. Zhdanov, who unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and was ordered to recuperate at Valdai, a health resort for members of the Soviet political elite. Zhdanov died there, and Stalin saw in his death the first filmy web of a plot that he knew would ultimately ensnare at least as many as he purged in the 1930's. Brent and Naumov progress from Zhdanov's death to blaming that death on a cabal of Jewish doctors. From there, they detail how Stalin began laying traps for nearly the entire leadership of the Soviet Secret Police, the MGB. Hundreds of high-ranking MGB officers were purged. Thousands of Jews were rounded up and shot or sent to a gulag. Clearly, Brent and Naumov portray a Russia that was only in the first stage of Stalinist immolation. Yet, when Stalin died, the entire apparatus of destruction came to a thankful halt. Russian society returned to a business as usual routine. The gloomy concluding chapters of STALIN'S LAST CRIME suggest that the monstrous vision of a bloody thug leader does not necessarily end with the death of that leader. In fact, many of the inner circle of Stalin's closest comrades were themselves arrested and shot by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khruschev, who decided that to hold onto power might require a Stalinist approach to housecleaning: a new broom must sweep most thoroughly every generation or so. Stalin's own virulent form of anti-semitism as suggested by Brent's and Naumov's subtitle: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, well indicates that for Stalin at least, recycling Soviet anti-semitism must always give way to creating demons that only he could vanquish.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Description of a Dictator's Spinmastery, February 23, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Hardcover)
As someone familiar with Russian history, I enjoyed this book. Among others, it debunks the myth that Stalin was weak and out of touch at the time of his death. The fact is he was clearly in control up until the time he died. Reading this book also raises more questions than it seems to answer. For example, how does this plot fuse with his foreign policy? The military? Was this strictly an internal affair or actually a prelude to Nuclear War with the United States? Although beyond the scope of this book, the reader was left wondering how Khruschev, Beria, Malenkov, et al worked out power arrangements after Stalin's death. We know, of course, that Beria was shot in December 1953; but what formed the BASIS for each person's power in what was clearly a lawless state?
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mind-Boggling Examination Of Stalin's Final Terror!, July 22, 2003
This review is from: Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Hardcover)
Some very interesting books are emerging concerning the former Soviet Union now that their archives are open for scholarly investigation. This book is certainly one of them, a well-written and carefully documented investigation of one of the darkest aspects of the Stalin era. No one, with the possible exception of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany, was directly responsible for the deaths of more human beings during the 20th century than was Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union's first comrade, a brilliant psychopath so deluded in his paranoid fantasies that he suspected everyone, always, of continuous conspiracy and perfidy against him. His resulting excesses included the campaign of terror, first instituted in the 1930s, and the systematic purges that became an integral aspect of the terror campaign. During the 1930s alone, he is estimated to have worked millions to death in enforced labor camps, creating what is now described as a "Gulag" in recent books such as Anne Applebaum's recent book of the same name. Yet although the Gulag and the terror campaign that supplied the bodies for its proliferation was most pronounced both before and during the Second World War, it was after the war that the extent of his murder and mayhem reached it horrific peak. Indeed, on the eve of his death in 1953, Stalin was actively planning to execute a bizarre and insane plan to kill hundreds of thousands of additional Russian citizens in what Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov describe in their book, "Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against The Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953" as constituting what they refer to as the "Doctor's Plot". The authors trace the evidence linking Stalin and the development by his staff produced false documentation of such a plot by doctors within the Soviet Union of intending to purge the Soviet Ministry of Security as well as the elite elements of government in a bizarre alleged conspiracy between Jewish M.D.s living in Russia and the American government to foist a coup d'etat of the Soviet regime. Stalin had concocted the idea based on the fact that he knew the lingering anti-Semitism within the Soviet Union would help convince the people that such a plot was both feasible and logical, which of course, it was not. What it really was a clever Machiavellian ruse to give Stalin the excuse he needed to purge the very institutions he was about to accuse the Jewish doctors of attempting to damage. In their stirring narration of the events and their consequences, the authors offer both provocative and damaging evidence of the standard Stalin course of action; by first obtaining a series of forced confessions, he would develop asset of anecdotal information files that he would then twist into a substantial set of circumstantial evidence supporting his theory. One of the more interesting of the findings was he evidence that late in life he seemed to develop a more cautious and deliberate approach to his domestic terror program, as though he sensed the overall mood of the country to have changed in the direction of wanting and supporting legitimacy, and he wanted to continue to ensure his power base both by working within the framework of what he believed to be the public consciousness on the one hand, and undermining his imagined foes by creating the docile of false evidence he could use to disarm and defeat them on the other. Most fascinating of the authors' theories is the idea that in attempting to foist yet one more purge on the feckless party hierarchy, Stalin set the stage for his own demise, which the authors argue may well have been a disguised assassination and not the natural death the rest of the outside world was led to believe it was. This is a wonderful book, and I am sure it is only the latest of what promises to be a steady stream of excellent books rewriting the history of the Soviet experiment with new information coming from the treasure trove of the Soviet archives. Enjoy!
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
