Overview

The definitive work on Stalin's purges, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Harrison Salisbury called it ""brilliant...not only an odyssey of madness, tragedy, and sadism, but a work of scholarship and literary craftsmanship."" And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the former Soviet Union, where it is now considered the definitive account of the period. When Conquest wrote the original volume, he relied heavily on unofficial sources. With the advent of glasnost, an avalanche of new material became available, and Conquest mined this enormous cache to write, in 1990, a substantially new edition of his classic work, adding enormously to the detail. Both a leading historian and a highly respected poet, Conquest blends profound research with evocative prose, providing not only an authoritative account of Stalin's purges, but also a compelling and eloquent chronicle of one of this century's most tragic events. He provides gripping accounts of everything from the three great ""Moscow Trials,"" to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, life in the labor camps, and many other key matters. On the fortieth anniversary of the first edition, in the light of further archival releases, and new material published in Moscow and elsewhere, it remains remarkable how many of Conquest's most disturbing conclusions have continued to bear up. This volume, featuring a new preface by Conquest, rounds out the picture of this huge historical tragedy, further establishing the book as the key study of one of the twentieth centurys most lethal, and longest-misunderstood, offenses against humanity.

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9780195316995

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It's hard to overestimate the impact that Robert Conquest's extraordinary study had on the West's perceptions of Soviet history. Using rare Soviet materials, some published during the Khrushchev thaw, others in self-published samizdat format, the British historian put together an authoritative chronicle of Stalin's murderous reign. Western communists and fellow travelers dismissed the book as propaganda. But when Soviet archives were partially opened in 1991, Conquest's estimates of 700,000 legal executions during 1937-38 -- and of the total number of other deaths thanks to the Soviet terror campaigns ( hardly lower than some fifteen million ) -- were proven chillingly accurate. -- Owen Matthews, N/A, Wall Street Journal Anthony Powell once wrote of Robert Conquest that he had a 'capacity for taking enormous pains in relation to any enterprise in hand.' It is beyond dispute that, forty years after the publication of The Great Terror, this judgment requires no reassessment. --Michael Weiss, The New Criterion The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn. --Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal

The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism. -Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal<br> All of Mr. Conquest's main findings have been magnificently vindicated. Stalin was not only the master criminal; he was the master concealer. It took a master detective, and a poet, like Mr. Conquest to unmask him completely. --Norman Davies, The New York Times Book Review<br>

Author Information

Robert Conquest is the author of some thirty books of history, biography, poetry, fiction, and criticism. The recipient of many honors and awards, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is at present Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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