The Great Terror

Campus Report ^ | July 29, 2008 | Jeff Waldmann

[bs9021]

The Great Terror

by: Jeff Waldmann, July 29, 2008

As a new edition of his illuminating book, The Great Terror, makes its way to the shelves, author Robert Conquest reflected back on the torrent of illuminating information about the former Soviet Union that has come out since the first edition was published four decades ago.

Perhaps most shocking of all of Conquest’s revelations is that even members of the Soviet Politburo did not definitively know the truth about atrocities committed by the communist regime. This became the subject of much contentious debate under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Conquest, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, writes in the Spring edition of Hoover Digest that prior to the publishing of the book’s first edition in 1968 there was a scant amount of trusted information on the reality of the Stalinist regime.

It gradually became clear that this period in Soviet history represented an immense blind spot, which Conquest believed could be eliminated by information already available.

He writes, “the facts released over the past few years, plus the often-denied testimony of some of the regime’s hostile but increasingly justified witnesses, could be put together, if carefully done, to produce a veridical story, a real history.”

Conquest’s book did exactly that, and the work was extremely successful in its endeavor, receiving favorable reviews from both sides of the political spectrum.

The book would prove to be the leak that burst the dam, as a veritable flood of supporting information washed over the official silence in the ensuing years.

Conquest writes that so much new information became openly available after 1989 that he was virtually forced to reexamine all of the facts and release a new addition of his book...

[TexanToTheCore]

Read this book. Very sobering.

[ozzymandus]

New edition? Guess I’ll order it.

[ThanhPhero]

a new addition of his book.<

Speech recognition program?