The Great Terror; A Reassessment

New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. viii, [2], 570. [4] pages. Occasional footnotes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Minor soiling. George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 - 3 August 2015) was an English-American historian. Conquest was noted for his works on Soviet history including The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968). In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit. In 1956, Conquest became writer and historian. In 1968, Conquest published his best-known work, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1939. The book was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the so-called "Khrushchev Thaw" in the period 1956-64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census. The most important aspect was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous focus on the "Moscow trials" of disgraced Communist Party leaders such as Bukharin and Zinoviev. 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. 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. 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 rounds out the picture of this huge historical tragedy, further establishing the book as the key study of one of the twentieth century's most lethal, and longest-misunderstood, offenses against humanity.