Editorial Review

When it was first published in France in 1997, Le livre noir du Communisme touched off a storm of controversy that continues to rage today. Even some of his contributors shied away from chief editorStéphane Courtois's conclusion that Communism, in all its many forms, was morally no better than Nazism; the two totalitarian systems, Courtois argued, were far better at killing than at governing, as the world learned to its sorrow.

Reviews (8)

As pertinent today as it was 25 years ago...
25 years ago, "Political Pilgrims" documented beyond any doubt the willing self-deception of intellectuals in love with the totalitarian regimes in Cuba, China, the Soviet Union and East Germany.The debate no longer rages over whether these countries were "freer" than their counterparts in the West.They aren't.What hasn't changed, however, is the continued willingness of intellectuals to find paradise anywhere but in the US.

Paul Hollander brings his trademark meticulousness to the study of Intellectuals who travel to what used to be referred to as Worker's Paradises.Using mountains of evidence, one cannot help but be persuaded that Western Intellectuals experience such a depth of alienation from their cultural birthplace, that they become morally blind to the abuses of its antagonists.

What's truly remarkable, is that none of this has changed.One merely needs to point to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and it's grotesque representation of Hussein's Iraq as an innocently peaceful place of playful children and mothers.At no point in that execrable movie does he mention the mass graves or torture chambers.

Michael, post your wish list on Amazon and I'll send you this book.Promise.

Take me by the hand and let's go strolling in wonderland
Hollander puts the selective moral outrage and selective acceptance of evidence of the Left on parade as he follows these blinkered one's through the various Potemkin Villages of the Totalitarians, from the October revolution forward into most of the 20th century.Smug arrogance knows no political party or religious faith, no gender, race or sexual preference, it seems to be evenly spread among us.In this instance the highly developed capacity for self-deception of the Left is on trial and an amusing trial at that.Their tortured explanations of the intellectually unexplainable are a fictive of mankind's marvelous ability "to transform things to the liking of his desires".

Like all those who are "blowin' in the wind", these intellectual hard heads do not seek truth, but instead to validate their worldview.This book is a study of intellectuals, estrangement and its consequences.

Reviews (169)

How many liberals would ever say "Tear down this Wall"?
Some people simply are unable to conceive of minds of men markedly different from themselves.The words are historian Robert Conquest's, but that's the substance of this book by Mona Charen; who provides example after example of people who project their psychological predispositions (to see themselves as inherently peaceful and well meaning) onto anyone showing the slightest indication of feeling similarly.Consequently, any conflict (because evil---by definition almost, does not exist) must be based on misunderstandings.That's why, for such folks, dialogue & negotiation are held so sacrosanct.In many ways it's an alternate religion even (which is convenient if you're an otherwise atheist too).That's why this quarter gives avowed revolutionaries passes on the means employed to achieve their self-pronounced "progressive" ends; and instinctively cautions against ever confronting such "progressives" with force. Even millions of deaths at the hands of such "progressives" do no give "The West" the right to intervene to "Play God", goes the refrain. Hence Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and the Sandinistas were all lauded by the Left; by outright Communists as well as by liberals who inclined in this direction.Miss Charen's book calls out by name these "Useful Idiots", useful to the cause of tyranny.Lenin called them idiots, it's his phrase; but he was glad to have the support of such dupes.It's not just Cold War history, however.Unfortunately, it's ever present what I wrote above, although now such dupes vociferously protest against any manner of intervention in Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, or you name it.For some, the only country worth protesting is the USA.In other societies, such as those in continental Europe, it's a little easier to identify such dupes since they wear their colors on their sleeves there (as members of Socialist, Green, or Communist parties).In the USA it's harder to tell, at least until that is, such folks open their mouths. That's the benefit of Ms. Charen's book---a record of where those inclined to sympathize with Leftist ideology have stood on every issue since the end of the Second World War. If you need reminding of this, or believed that nonsense during the week of Reagan's funeral---when a slew of those who hated Reagan suddenly seemed inclined to admit that winning the "Cold War" was a communal effort that everyone supported---then I recommend you have a look at this book.Otherwise, you may want to consider some works a little more scholarly than this treatment. (For some books of interest herein take a look at my Amazon readers Guide: "Understand Leftists."If my list isn't visible somewhere on this page, it can be accessed by clicking on my name, thence to "So you'd like to..." ) (04Nov) Cheers!

Liberals unwittingly prove Charen right
Reading the "reviews" of some liberals (at least one has admitted to not even reading the book,) all I see is a confirmation of Charen's basic thesis, "that the American left hates American and wishes that the Communists had won the Cold War."

One "review" which doesn't actually review the book lists the countries that the U.S. supposedly attacked, though that list is seriously flawed.What that list doesn't show is the number of countries that the Soviet Union attacked.Charen makes reference to the fact that the Liberals look at what they perceive as our sins, but refuse to look at the much greater sins of our Cold War adversaries!Why?Charen provides a convincing argument that they actually symphathized with the Communists during the Cold War and actually wanted them to win.

From Viet Nam and Cambodia to El Salvador and Nicaragua, Charen shows how wrong the liberals were on all counts.Communists in Cambodia will calm down when the U.S. leaves.That is what the liberals wanted us to believe.What happened?As much as one third of the population of the country was slaughtered in THREE YEARS!The Liberals believed that the Sandanistas were popular in Nicaragua.What happened when they actually had an election?Violetta Chamorro, leader of the opposition, won the election, a result that stunned the media elite in the United States.The media also slandered the family of Elian Gonzalez, not to mention the Cuban American community.Why do the liberals like every refugee and immigrant EXCEPT the Cubans?Because they are fleeing the country they look to as a paradise.Mona provides overwhelming evidence in the form of quotes and actions by mainstream liberal democrat policy makers that they indeed hate America and love the Communists.

The next time you hear a liberal claim that they were as opposed to the Communists during the Cold War as we all were against the Nazis, show them this book and the quotes therein.This is the history of liberals and leftists.It is one they should be ashamed of.Sad thing is that they are not ashamed of it at all.

Reviews (19)

Communists in Denial
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's In Denial is a detailed analysis of the publications and techniques of America's Stalin worshippers.While millions of Americans believe that communism died by 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of many of the archives in Russia, the authors revealed that American Communists remain active in the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, in the recommendations of content for children's textbooks, and in many other influential positions.While Nazism and Communism are both totalitarian ideologies, why do American universities employ worshippers of Stalin but not of Hitler?

The Communist revisionist historians can be detected easily, regardless of the labels they use to conceal their Communist beliefs.For example, what did a historian write about the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 22, 1939 and of the role of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)?Stalin supported Hitler's rise to power in Germany.American Communist true believers were too stupid to understand what Stalin was doing.The CPUSA took an anti-Nazism position and cheered the Polish resistance to Hitler until the Soviet Union revealed that it would invade and annex half of Poland.

Initially, American Communists supported a third term for President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat.In 1940, Roosevelt mandated the choice of Henry Wallace as his vice president.When the Soviet Union changed policies, the CPUSA reversed its position and attacked Roosevelt.Wallace won the endorsement of the American Communists when he ran for president in 1944.

Throughout the book, the authors stressed the anti-communist efforts of American liberals, Democrats, socialists, neoconservatives, and of former CPUSA members.Both Lenin and American conservatives shared negative views of left-of-center politicians in Western democracies.American Communists are still attempting to brand all anti-communists as McCarthyites.American Communists claim that Senator Joseph McCarthy's congressional investigations were terrible witch hunts while ignoring or minimizing the tens of millions who were murdered or terrorized in Communist countries.

American Communists have claimed that neoconservatives (neo-Trotskyites) are anti-communist.In fact, neoconservatives are only anti-Stalin.

American Communists continue to hold important positions in American universities and in other important organizations.Neoconservatives have been able to be elected even as Republicans to Congress.Neoconservatives support the MEK (or MKO or Rajavi cult), a Marxist terrorist organization responsible for the murders of American military officers, Rockwell International employees, and large numbers of innocent persons in the Middle East.

With researchers able to study some of the Russian archives, it is now possible to prove that many Americans lied when they claimed that they were not Communists or Communist spies.Unlike the Salem witch trials and the killings of innocent persons, the House Committee on Un-American Activities identified correctly many Americans as being Communists.

Clearly, nearly all Americans need to read In Denial.Truly, ignorance is a weapon of mass destruction.

Professor Paul Sheldon Foote

California State University, Fullerton

Great documentation of a huge injustice
In Denial shows, in gruesome detail, how many academics are willing to destroy the truth and betray their academic responsibilities in order to put a positive spin on communism.

The authors point out how historical revisionists who try to deny the holocaust are justifiably ridiculed, but those who try to deny Soviet atrocities are in the mainstream in academia.While they prove this point with dozens of interesting examples, the question of why they do this received little attention.Also unanswered was the question of how academia got so unbalanced.

The book also shows that some academics are no longer able to deny acts of treason by numerous communists, so they are now justifying them as being true to their "principles".They portray capitalism and socialism as moral equivalents from which to choose.While the authors point out that USSR prohibited opposition parties and the US allowed them, they could have gone much further to illustrate that this is a basic choice of good and evil and that those who chose to aid the USSR were evil, as are those who defend it today.

Aside from these issues, the book was an enjoyable and informative peek behind the iron curtain that still appears to exist in academia.

Reviews (7)

Stalin wasn't the exception---Lenin too was murderous thug
"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 andnames 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!

The Tales of Stalin
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.

Reviews (13)

Almost flawless.
This is an extraordinary book. It is an extremely important companion to Conquest's "The Great Terror", for it sets the table.And what a feast it is.Many of the people reading this will have grown up like I did in a cold war household.In those days, in Canada anyway, I actually had friends who ardently espoused communism.Who extolled Lenin and even Stalin.Who saw the western democracies as weak, rotten to the core and on their last legs.We all knew people like that.

It was the western media, more than anything else that we had to thank for that.It was dominated by leftists, many of them (as hard as this is the believe) actually in the pay of, or beholden to, Russia.Those who weren't were hopelessly and wilfully blind.For me, one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th Century was how so many people came to be so thoroughly duped by a murderous gang of thugs who had hijacked the Russian people and sought to take over the world.How was it possible?Pipes tells this story.

And he pulls no punches.He comes from the Thucydidean school ofhistory.He is absolutely unafraid to pass judgement.The first part of the book covers the Russian Civil war from 1918 - 1920.This strange, complex struggle still has yet to have a book length study devoted to it. But Pipes provides the reader with more than enough.

Like Conquest, Pipes is at pains to point out that there was nothing at all organic about the Russian Revolution. It was more of a coup d'etat, stage managed by a tiny cadre of Bolsheviks who had the army on their side. The workers and the peasants, and this is CRUCIAL for our understanding of what happened, had literally NOTHING to do with it.

Once Lenin and his gang were in control (and I use the term "gang" advisedly because they behaved and operated very like a criminal gang), they turned their attention to the rest of the world.They actually believed that their "revolution" was to be followed by a world revolution - which they would supervise. Pipes chapter entitled "Communism for Export" will have you shaking your head in disbelief.

The Russians knew they couldn't control what was written about them unless they controlled WHO did the writing.They did this by refusing the major press agencies access to Russia until Moscow had approved the journalist.The Sunday Times famously stood up to this bullying for decades.Not the New York Times.They sent a pre-approved journalist by the name of Walter Duranty.Ironically, Duranty was an out spoken anti-Communist.But he quickly realised that if he wrote what the Russians wanted, he would have access to inside information - with that would come influence and fame.Better yet for Duranty, he very early on identified Stalin as Lenin's likely successor (at a time whichthis was not at ALL obvious).He began to eulogise Stalin.He praised collectivisation, denied the Ukrainian famine - and resorted to lie upon lie upon lie.Such was the credulity of the western public and press that he was rewarded for his infamy with the Pulitzer Prize.

He was not alone.Muggeridge reports that all the correspondents voluntarily took their wire stories to the censors to be censored.John Reed, virtually canonisedby the movie Reds (a movie which is in and of itself largely a shocking lie), was nothing more than a fellow-traveller blind to every excess of the Bolsheviks.The portrait of him in these pages will have your blood boiling.Randolph Hearst in a signed editorial in 1918 described Lenin's regime as the "truest democracy in Europe."

The point needs to be made bluntly.All of these journalists and fellow travellers have blood on their hands.Had the world stood up to first Lenin and later Stalin, millions, COUNTLESS millions could have been saved.

I have so little room to extol this book.I can only hope that my enthusiasm will in some way prove infectious and draw you to read it. I have focused on one aspect of this book. There is so much more.For example.Pipes makes persuasive case that Communism, Fascism and National Socialism have common roots. That Russian communism was eerily similar to Tsarism (only the Tsarists were more compassionate!)

Very importantly, Lenin comes in for the thrashing that he has so richly deserved all these long years.This zealot has escaped scrutiny for decades - largely because what came after him was so nightmarish.People for some reason like to think of Lenin as a benign philosopher - idealistic and pure - whose dreams were shattered by the evil that was to follow. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING could be farther from the truth.He was a murderer, a mass murderer, just like Stalin.The only difference was one of scale. The fact was that Lenin hated democracy - stamped it out - built a totalitarian dictatorship - and paved the way for one of the greatest monsters of all time.And it is small solace to know that Lenin and his gang of thugs reaped what they sowed.That years later Stalin would literally exterminate them with their own weapons.

Read this Book.It is one of the most important books about the 20th Century you will ever read - and it is filled with lessons that we must take to heart.We CAN learn from history.History teaches us to see patterns - it helps us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

A Book No Historian Can Be Without
This is definitely one book that sheds light on the early years of Lenin's regime.This book covers many different aspects of the early regime, from the trials of the civil war to the regime's early attempts to spread communism across the western world.Other aspects included the early education programs of the regime and the government bureaucracy that grew like wildfire.The main time frame of this book is from just after the revolution to about the time of Lenin's death, although many topics extend into the 1930s.One can also pick out the topics that were obvious problems in the early 1920s, yet were still present upon the regime's demise in 1991.

Richard Pipes does an excellent job of providing the reader with a comprehensive view of the early regime - few topics go untouched.More importantly, this book is based on a large amount of factual, documented information, some of which has been made available by the recently opened archives in Russia.

This is one of the most authoritative books I have read about the Soviet Union.In the words of the person who recommended it to me - "You'll understand nothing about the Soviet Union if you haven't read this book."

Fatally Flawed
The second volume of Richard Pipes' history of the Russian Revolution shares many of the flaws as the first volume:a refusal to contemplate much recent scholarship, a correspondingly shallow sociological framework, and a complete lack of sympathy not merely for the Bolsheviks, but for the Russians as a whole.Only when they serve as victims of the Bolsheviks does Pipes profess any sympathy.Pipes devotes a whole chapter to Lenin's vicious persecution of religion.Yet one cannot forget Pipes' own comment in Russia Under the Old Regime that Russian Orthodoxy was the most sycophantic and callous of the Christian churches.

In discussing this book's weaknesses, three come to mind most strongly.The first is Pipes' explanation of the Civil War.According to Pipes although the Bolsheviks had virtually no popularity they were able to maintain control of Russia because they were fortunately centered in the heartlands of Russia's industrial might.With this centre under control they were able to conquer the rest of what would become the Soviet Union, which they did with appalling cruelty.Indeed, Pipes goes on to sneer at the Bolsheviks for taking so long and at Trotsky's skill as a military commander.But this is clearly flawed.After all, Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and no doubt many others had been heavily outnumbered and outgunned.Yet they still managed to triumph and win.The Whites were never able to create their own Yenan.Despite mass poverty, famine and economic collapse within the Red zone, they were never able to create a real war economy in their own areas and appeal to the rest of the country.The simple fact was that the Whites were too autocratic and dictatorial to mobilize the popular support they needed to win.Reading Jon Smele's monograph on the fate of Admiral Kolchak brings out their own cruelty and incompetence.Likewise Geoffrey Swain has lucidly argued that the anti-Bolshevik cause suffered a fatal defeat when the populist SRs were betrayed by the quasi-monarchist whites.I'malso not pleased at Pipes' treatment of atrocities.Pipes of course agrees that they were responsible for most of the pogroms committed against Jews.But one should point out that they could be quite vicious against Gentiles as well.And as one might expect from a Commentary contributor Pipes tries to show Woodrow Wilson as unduly soft-hearted and sympathetic towards the Reds.One should read David Foglesong's book on American intervention to find out what really happened.

Second, as a Polish refugee from the Nazi-Soviet pact, Pipes want to show as much as possible the identity of the two dictatorships, and how Leninism was the key inspiration of later totalitarian regimes.The key flaw in Pipes's approach is his tendentious and partial use of the literature.He relies on conservative scholars like Renzo De Felice, Ernest Nolte and James Gregor to help argue, among other things, that Mussolini was in many ways a socialist.By contrast Adrian Lyttleton's seminal work on the Fascist dictatorship and Denis Mack Smith's portrayal of Mussolini's breathtaking opportunism go by completely unmentioned.In order to emphasize Hitler's radicalism he often cites Herman Rauschning's "memoirs," yet recent scholars find him unreliable and inaccurate.Ian Kershaw's recent biography of Hitler does not cite him at all, and in turn Pipes ignores Kershaw's invaluable The Nazi Dictatorship.Pipes also relies heavily on David Schoenbaum's Hitler's Social Revolution, yet he makes no mention of the many scholars who have heavily qualified Schoenbaum's argument that there was one.Finally, Pipes quotes Domenico Settimbrini's suggestion that if Russia had been neutral in 1914, Lenin would have been as "interventionist" and militarist as Mussolini was in successfully agitating against Italian neutrality.In response one should point out that if Russia had been neutral in 1914, there would not have been a world war and there would have been no war for Lenin to intervene in.Second, if Lenin had supported intervention he would no doubt have been treated by Pipes with much more indulgence.

Reviews (27)

Excellent History of a Sobering Event
No doubtly a classic work, this one is (according to my knowledge) the only entire book about the entire Soviet Great Famine.
The Famine was meant to kill the "Kulaks", which Stalin said, but it was in reality done to kill many of the peasents so that they wouldnt resist his dark control anymore, and would just submit, to end the suffering.
The numbers are good, as he says 11 million died from Collectivazation Starvation, but the 2-3 million number dying in the Gulag might be questionable, but if you include undocumented arbiterally executions, i guess you might reach near that amount.
This is overall a great book, even though its very academic and would fry a lot of peoples minds (Even i feel asleep almost once or twice while reading it!) It is still one of the few books documenting a entire destructive event from its origins to its end.
I would recommend it to most scholars, and people intrested in Russian History, Politics, and economics. To see what horrors makind has done, and for those politicians and economists not to enact such as policy again.

Informative, but a bit too academic
A very thorough account of the collectivization of farms in Ukraine and the resulting starvation of the families who grew the food that got shipped elsewhere by order of the communist authorities. It's a more heady and academic read than I would like, but certainly worthwhile as a history of that time and place.

Reviews (20)

Wonderful Work
This book is another work of Conquest that deserves to be a Classic. It documents extremely accuratly, percisily, and detailedly the events of 1935-1939 during the Great Purge/Terror.

The Numbers in my opinion, are perfectly accurate. The one million executed has been proven by documents found in the USSR archives, and also then taking into account how many documents were lit on fire that were kept in eastern europe before the Germans advanced.

The 2-3 Million died in the Gulag is also possibly a bit overbloated like the The Harvest of Sorrow Gulag numbers. It is very unshure of, since sometimes Conquest says 3 million died in the 1930's in the Gulag, sometimes he says 6+ million, it sometimes gets very confusing in tracking the numbers.

Overall this book is a classical work on the Great Purge/Terror, and once again, one of the only full books on the subject at all. I recommened this to scholars and normal people wishing to see how goverments can use the law to terrorize its own people on purpose.

The Great Terror: One part in a tradegie of Many
I'd first of like to admit that i am a kid, yet i am more smarter about the tradegies of history than any other teenager. The Great Terror at the beginning started off boring, but once I learned a bit more and got intrested, i felt it was very good. This academic work on The Great Terror, along with some parts of the Terror Famine in it is a excellent work. The book itself is a genual classic. The deaths of at least 20 million deserves more than just one work though, it deserves many more. There are many works about the Holocaust, and other geonocides, yet there are far lesser works on Stalin than there are on the Holocaust or Hitler. The great terror goes through a great job telling about these horrible events, and the parts it summarizes, such as the famine or Kolyma, Robert Conquest writes another genuine book on it with amazing detail and accuaracy.

I in particular believe that Stalin killed much more than 20 million. He at least killed 25 million, and up to 42 million DIRECTLY. Indirect killing, which is never counted for, adds up to much more...Stalin basically was key in starting,aiding,or supporting 5 wars to start. He was key in the Russian Revolution, he aided and supported the Chinese Revolution, Gave Kim Jung the permission to attack south korea, and supported the Vietnam Revolution against the French, and much of this fits into the cold war too. He also fueled hitler's cruel acts, blocked his polish invasion, and also hitler got many of his ideas from stalin, which thus led to WW2, and the Holocaust, and dont forget Stalin's later mini-holocaust too.This creates a indirect total of over 60 million dead, added with the 42/20 million, creates a indirect/direct total of 80-102,000,000 million people killed by Stalin, not counting those he tortured horribally.

Reviews (7)

Red Blood
A good overview of the horrible cost to the people of the USSR resulting from Stalin's rule. Professor Rayfield writes with clear, and understandable, moral disgust at what happened from the 1920s to the early 1950s in Russia. (However, I do think the author in the end goes too easy on Beria.) This book is valuable to help one understand the current politics of President Vladimir Putin and why the Russia of today is not blossoming with liberty.

Dark lords
Views of the Russian Revolution and its course have been transformed by the archival research opened up in the wake of the fall of the Bolshevik era, and the results are transforming our views of the Stalin period. This exceedingly blunt portrait of the henchmen of Stalin fairly well completes in the small the large scale picture seen in books like the _Black Book of Communism_. The closely focused detail of the criminality of the whole enterprise, especially the almost surreal world of the secret police chiefs, from Dzierzhinsky to Beria, makes for compelling reading. Explaining the resulting portrait of evil actually becomes harder, because it seems almost incomprehensible. Why by any standard would Stalin plot to exterminate the Kulaks? Is this merely stupidity mixed with psychopathic sadism? It almost seems like a will to fail. As in this instance the whole revolution foundered almost immediately as the untested shibboleths of ideology all failed at the first step, driving its perpetrators to extremes in the expectation of making it work.In the midst of this we find Stalin to be an intelligent bookworm and student of literature reading five hundred pages a day, and interested in the fate of Russian poetry. His psychology remains to be understood.
On the one hand we have the catastrophe of ambitious and ruthless men coming to power. But there is another side that shows much of the violence already present very early on, in lesser doses, even in the pre-Revolutionary years. All the principals seem to arrive at the critical Leninistic phase with their values set, falling into the traps of the confused ideologies of the Second Internationale, ready to provoke terror, the rules of the game already jelled. The result had little to do with Communism and more with the resurfacing legacy of the very world the revolutionaries said they were overthrowing. The point is clear from odd and chilling details, e.g. Stalin's inspiration from Ivan the Terrible. The book's conclusion suggests these latent strains are still at work, resurfacing in the current Russian exit phase, as if to turn around and move back into the nightmare. We should hope not! The disinformation of the Stalin 'mystique' in Russia itself apparently still operates, but all these new accounts will hopefully contribute to a better awareness of just what transpired.

Reviews (73)

The Gulag Archipelago: A Couragous Gift
This book is a beutiful piece of literature and history. It was also written while on the run from the most devastating goverment in existence. The book is much more intresting to read, literature wise, than most academic works. The truth of the horrible soviet conditions in the gulag and the horrible and equally evil denial of the west that these things happened.
This is a book that should be read in many places, at least in Russia, and for anyone else who truly wants to understand human life and the history of humanity.

A voyage through hell
"The line between good andevil runs through the heart of every human being."

This abridged edition of Solzhenitsyn's hauntingly intimate portrait of his own arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, rebellion, and eventual release during Stalin's purges is a book like no other.This book, written by a constantly watched and persecuted dissident - bent but not broken by the brutality of Stalinist work camps, shares the author's (and his other inmates') personal experiences falling into this dark, usually fatal, abyss.Solzhenitsyn's original work was published in 1971 and produced an absolutely damning indictment of communism in Russia.Indeed, the stunning quality and importance of his writing earned him a Nobel prize.

Besides his own experiences, Solzhenitsyn collected personal stories from hundreds of his fellow inmates.The sadism of interrogators, the cruelty of guards, the indifference of neighbors, the paranoia of the public, thebetrayal of stoolies, and the true comradery of innocent inmates are presented in vivid, factual detail.In addition to this, the author also presents an encyclopeadic knowledge of the entirety of the gigantic Stalinist security apparatus (normal labor camps, special labor camps, transfer camps, railroad transfers, prisons, holding cells, interrogation cells, NKVD, SMERSH, commissars, exile communities, and still more).

But at the heart of it all, the book remains an unforgettable journey through man-made hell.Stalin meant to destroy every man, woman, and child arrested, regardless of their innocence, and he largely succeeded.But survivors like Solzhenitsyn did truly 'tear down the wall' and made this world a far better place to live in.We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude!

Reviews (48)

The Gulag: Good On Details
This Book is very good at describing the details of the Gulag, and its history in general. It lacks behind in a few areas though, areas which are very critical. The Numbers.
The Numbers in this book are about the bottom rock low you can use. 30 Million passed through? The best numbers indicate 40 Million DIED, with many million more passing through. The Numbers are clearly very low, but that is partialy due to the Extreme lack of any evidence left in this world, and can only be use by the assumption of partial evidence, which is what the soviets WANTED You to see, with all the dreadful documents about the most dreadful parts being burned in WW2 while the Russians retreated from Ukraine and Russia while the Germans advanced, and the archives were annihlated in order to prevent the passing of the dark knowledge into the people.

Why
The question for me in such tragedies of mass murder or forced labor or the inhumane way man treats man is "why".I think that Ms. Applebaum comes the closest to explaining the why of the Gulag as anyone else has.She is honest about the shortcomings of some of the information from memoirists and from USSR documents but continues on in order to make sense of the whole tragedy.I am not any happier knowing what happened, I am more frightened actually that it will happen again and that so many don't even know that the Gulag happened at all.

Reviews (3)

Revolution from abroad, and inside too
Jan Gross does a commendable job in expanding the studies of World War II Central European History beyond the dominant themes:Poland, and the Holocaust.

He focuses on what was, from Versailles to Molotov-Ribbentrop, eastern Poland, today, Byelorussia, Lithuania and western Ukraine.The first map effectively demonstrates the shifting borders, and how ethnographic identities could be lost in a swirl of martial dust.Jan Gross starts with the dual invasion of September 1939, and at a social anthropological level, examines the initial responses of the ethnic populations of those areas either outright taken by Soviet forces, or first seized by German forces, and then ceded back to Soviet control.The first part"Seizure" is broken into three chapters that neatly chronicle the seizure, transfer of authority from Polish government to Soviet government, the so-called elections, and final imposition of total social control.The Soviets exploited the chaos and lawlessness that existed prior to and during the initial stages of their arrival to impose their own hierarchy and control mechanisms, whether through promises of wealth redistribution, political power via elections, or simple terror.While going through this process, Gross spends detailed, yet concise prose on scrutinizing the new power relationships between Poles "cruelly victimized" Ukrainians "always exploited" and Jews "weak...looking for some power to regulate their relationships."Gross goes to great lengths to destroy the myth that Jews were frequent, widespread conspirators or supporters of the new Communist regime.Gross proves that there was a level playing field, in which "people lost all privacy."He further goes to show how the Soviets tapped into the emotional vein of all peasants in the region since the 17th century, land distribution and reform, not so much to "make things better" but to "create havoc in the countryside."Ultimately, as gross notes, the Soviets sought an "induced self destruction of a community."

The elections were the final part of the triad for the imposition of Soviet control.They made everyone vulnerable, and created power struggles between teachers and other intellectual leaders, and the new regime and its officers, no matter how stupid, inept or corrupt.The great quote on p. 85 sums of the average reception of elections, held just weeks after the Soviets took over "What the voting was for...I don't know."Gross details the actual voting, counting of votes and manipulation of the results by the Soviets, and how the October 1939 elections set the stage for follow on elections (and state processes for control) in March 1940.

In his detailed examination of social control, Gross asserts his most interesting scholarly work, namely, that instead of the totalitarian state confiscating the private realm, in fact, the Soviet system privatized the public realm.In other words, the state did not control the terror-every private citizen had access to terror and its effects by making private matters an issue of public (Soviet) concern.As Gross further notes in his theory "the real power of the totalitarian state results from it being at the disposal of every inhabitant, available for hire at a moment's notice."

In the second part of the book "Confinements," Gross concentrates on the maintenance of terror until the (re) liberation by the Germans in 1941.He concentrates on the upending of the social apple cart where traditional authority figures such as parents, religious leaders and teachers are replaced by cultural, sports and militant atheism programs to woo, seduce, and control the youth.Through this, and the induction of permanent disorder, the Trotsky ideal of permanent revolution is maintained, even while Trotsky himself is drinking tequila and waiting for an ice pick in Mexico.The substructure for permanent chaos and terror is the NKVD, their prisons, tortures, and depopulation/deportation of peoples.Gross estimates that in 20 months, in just this region, approximately 120,000 people were arrested and imprisoned, and another 315,000 deported.For this rural area with few cities, this is indeed a staggering toll in such a short time, and added to the wider destruction of World War II, represents a towering figure of almost unimaginable and permeating suffering and loss.Gross ends the regular text with a challenge to historians to move into the kresy between the Oder and the Urals, and really examine the 1939-1941 period with its larger implications not only on the war, but all of post modern central European history.

Lastly, in this new expanded addition, Gross adds an after word, "Tangle Web," that examines the interaction of Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian suffering, but primarily focused on Poles and Jews in previously Polish lands.That the Polish elites were decimated is not debatable; that the Jews were almost eliminated is also not debatable.What Gross tries to do, with mixed results, is move the debate past the common stereotypes (which means admitting that they exist, no easy task in this region) and into the long term effects, still present today, and, as Lenin would say, ask what is to be done?Finally Gross spends some more time on the issue, not of Polish Jewish relations, but of Soviet Jewish relations, and concludes that, referring to the deportations of Jews, the "victims of deportations turned out to be the lucky ones."Gross also shows other tidbits of anecdotal evidence that seems to show the potential for almost disastrous post war Polish Jewish relations existed, in not in fact, than at least in the perceived public perceptions, as early as late 1939, and grew worse under the cumulative pressures of Germans, Soviets, Germans again, Soviets again, imposition of Warsaw Pact in the 1939 to 1949 decade.

This book is a hard read, because it deals with many layers of issues simultaneously.Life, too, is not a series of isolated events, but a sequential interaction of parallel choices, actions, and occurrences.Gross thus makes a statement better than the average historical timeline, but more challenging in its presentation, and demanding in its search for illumination and accuracy.

excellent
According to the Polish national anthem, "Poland is not dead whilst we live. What others took by force, with the sword will be taken back." Both Nazi and Soviet occupiers must have taken these words to heart as they set out thoroughly to crush the Polish population between September 1939 and June 1941. In Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorusssia, Jan T. Gross (New York University) draws on documents from Polish, German, Israeli, and U.S. archives to show with camera-like precision how ordinary Polish citizens at the grassroots level experienced the Soviet occupation of Poland and the mechanisms Soviet authorities used to induce their participation. U.S. citizens who have never known the horrors of foreign occupation will find this study especially sobering. Polish citizens never knew when a few Soviet soldiers might enter their houses and apartments, live there for several days or weeks, eat their food, and steal their possessions. If they resisted, they faced arrest, torture, and/or execution, often in full view of loved ones. As Soviet soldiers explained to the newly adopted Soviet citizens, "There are three categories of people in the Soviet Union: those who were in jail, those who are in jail, and those who will be in jail." (p. 230). Gross points out that, in sheer numbers, more Polish citizens suffered under Soviet occupation in the first two years of World World II (i.e. before the Nazis' mass annihilation of Jews began) than under German occupation. Whereas the Germans killed approximately 120,000 Poles, the Soviet security police (NKVD) nearly "matched that figure in just two episodes of mass execution" (viz., the mass murder of Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940, and the evacuation of prisons in the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia during June and July 1941). (p. 228). However, despite the Soviets' greater victimization of Polish citizens in terms of loss of life, suffering inflicted by forced resettlement, and material losses through confiscation, Gross argues that, to the Polish and Jewish citizens, the Soviet occupiers seemed less "oppressive." They lacked the "discriminatory contempt" and "Übermensch airs" that the Nazis evinced so imperiously (p. 230). The author explains that perhaps one reason why the Soviet army seemed less oppressive at first is that it claimed to "liberate" Poland. Generally, the population was confused about Soviet intentions, and indeed, "nobody had warned the local community and the authorities that a Bolshevik invasion was possible and what to do in case it occurred" (p. 22). The deceptive slogans of national liberation soothed millions of wishful thinking Polish citizens-Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians-who "could meet fellow ethnics" in the Red Army or the Soviet administration (p. 230). The stark contrast between soldiers in the Wehrmacht and those in the Red Army - the latter in coats of assorted lengths, with rags wrapped around their shoeless feet -- also made the Soviet occupiers seem less intimidating. Still another reason for the Red Army's cloddish image is the febrile rapaciousness with which the soldiers bought and consumed Polish goods. Expecting to hear discussions of lofty communist ideals, Poles instead saw "in the marketplace how these Soviet people ate eggs, shell and all, horseradish, beets, and other produce. Country women rolled with laughter" (p. 46). In a restaurant "a Red Army soldier might order several courses or a dozen pastries and eat them all on the spot" (p. 46). In comparison to Nazi Germany, then, the Soviet Union struck the Poles as a petty and materialistic "spoiler state."
In addition to these colorful descriptions in the first part of the book, Gross also raises a serious, but long neglected, topic in his final historiographical essay ("A Tangled Web"): Polish-Jewish relations during World War II. Why didn't more Polish citizens try to help the Polish Jews? To be sure, one faced severe penalties-torture and execution, often in front of one's family members. However, ignorance persists among Poles today about the ultimate fate of Polish Jews. Gross cites an opinion poll in which Poles were asked who suffered and died more, the Poles or Jews, during World War II? About 30% thought it was roughly equal. Almost no one realized that nearly all Polish Jews were killed. Gross also explains how anti-Semitism prevailed in Poland during the war and even after (Auschwitz) was revealed in all its horror (p . 248).
Revolution from Abroad thus makes an important contribution to a growing body of literature about the ignorance of the populations in Warsaw Pact countries of their countries' Nazi pasts. The Soviet-imposed myth about "communist heroes of resistance" enabled them for decades to avoid the painful questions faced long ago by other Western countries, West Germany in particular.

Brilliant analysis of an ignored event of World War II
The main primary source of this book is a collection of thousands of handwritten statements collected by the Polish government in exile when they interviewed the surviving Polish citizens released after the 1942"amnesty" of those detained by the Soviets after 1939.By carefulresearch, crosschecking and comparison with other resources Professor Grosshas been able to produce a work of exceptional clarity and importance inunderstanding the workings of Stalinism in particular and totalitarianismin general.

He provides an outline of Soviet occupation policy andmethods.The whole process seems to have been well planned out, one phasesetting up the conditions to implement the second, which in turn set up theconditions for the third, all this operating within an artificialatmosphere of fear, chaos and confusion.An initial period of lawlessness,promoted by the Soviets in order for a rapid collapse of the old orderaccompanied by the promoting of ethic hatreds among the four main groups-Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews, was followed by rapidconsolidation of police powers by those who owed their new won power toSoviet authority alone.In the process of laying out this interestingstory, Gross adds many interesting insights.

Discussion of socialcontrol, prisons and deportation, NKVD interrogation methods (including useof female interrogators) and much more provides a well rounded sketch ofthis particularly brutal episode of Polish history.I found his analysisof the "privatization of the public realm", "the spoiler state","totalitarian language", and Soviet use of family networks to insurediscipline and control illuminating.

Reviews (5)

Lies, lies, lies
Ha-ha, this guy is a piece of work, isn't he? I am a Bulgarian, and have lived in Bulgaria during Communism, as opposed to this so-called historian. While it is true that Communism was not a picnic, the "historians", especially in the West greatly exagerate the facts.
Yes, the camps existed, but the vast majority of their population were criminal and not political prisoners.
No, Bulgaria did not have dissidents. The so-called dissidents appeared a week after the Berlin Wall fell.
Do not read this book, it is a loss of time and money.

Pretentious, unscholarly and simply WRONG
The author T. Todorov is a Bulgarian living in France and working as a Historian there. I first ran across his lack of professionalism in my historiography class at Harvard University. He is an 'expert', in ancient Meso-American cultures (if I remember correctly) but tries to voice opinions on all human history in every period and geographical regions. Among professional historians in the West you will not find one person who takes him seriously because he talks about things he does not know about.

This book is a perfect example. There is a cottage industry in the West among pseudoscholars, in institutes paid by powerful interests, to spit on every country which used to be socialist or member of the Warsaw pact. The more spit the better. You'll get your book published and so on. I won't even mention my research because even a resume will take 20 pages. But I will state for the record: this book is nothing more than a commercial "common sense" for every spineless, onanistic pseudoscholar in a Western university. People who have not lived in Bulgaria during socialism and who know nothing about the system might swallow the bait.

Todorov is a hack, just like so many who make their living his way.

Editorial Review