Red Terror (Stalin: Breaker of Nations - Robert Conquest)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Stalin: Breaker of Nations - Robert Conquest
Date:	20/07/00 (112 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Stalin is often overlooked.

Disadvantages: Could have been better-written.

Not a particularly well-written book, with a fair number of illiteracies, but interesting, particularly for the insight it gives into Stalin's character and personality: a sense of the dark, brooding, granite quality of his will comes across strongly. There were glimpses rather than detailed descriptions of the terror he inflicted on the Soviet Union, but one of the most sinister was the mention of trains constantly circling Moscow on which "criminals" were tortured. There were farcical scenes from his later life, when he conducted heavy drinking sessions with terrified cronies, subjecting them to his coarse, bullying humor. His unpleasant and undignified death was given some attention: he suffered a stroke and lay alone in his quarters for hours, dribbling and unable to speak, while his servants remained too frightened of him to try and find out what was wrong. A final reflection, I suppose, is that people like Stalin exist everywhere, all doing evil in their own limited ways: the real evil is the state and its mechanisms, which give people like him the opportunity to exercise their sadism and megalomania.

(If you're interested in the other point of view about Stalin, visit Red Comrades at http://www.geocities.com/redcomrades/index.html. This is a recently instituted site that questions the reality and scale of the Red Terror and the atrocities of Stalinism. Gulag Denial?)

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