A must read. This is not ot the first book on the early Soviet Union you should read. Told as a chronicle of events and the author assumed that the reader is familiar with the the people and their roles in the formation of the Soviet revolution and the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. ( )

This book focuses entirely on Stalin's rise from Lenin's successor as Soviet head-of-state to absolute dictator. Stalin used several waves of purges to arrest, try, and execute his political competetors and opponents. Friends, families, and aquaintences of his victims were also rounded up and exiled to Siberian work camps for years, even decades. The trials were absolute farces, and frequently included forged depositions, confessions ellicited under torture, and false testimony. In one trial, the defense attorney starts his address to the court with an apology for defending such a reprehensible client! The result of such events was to leave the entire Soviet population scared of their government, and untrusting of one another. When lack of enthusiasm (for official policies) was a crime, the mere appearance of impropriety could mean a knock on one's door from the secret police late at night. The entire population was literally terrorized by one man.

THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC
So how did Koba (Stalin) get away with this? The same tried-and-true method world leaders continue to use today: the Hegelian dialectic; a handy, three-step program:

1) Create a problem.
2) Control the public response. (e.g. By allowing only one iterpretation to be aired on official news/opinion outlets; demonize and/or marginalize people with opposing views)
3) Offer the pre-planned official solution. (Which was the planner's goal all along.)

Ever simplistic in his goals, Stalin's purpose was the elimination of all possible political opposition. The first great purge started small and cautiously in December 1934. The targets were limited to Stalin's old Bolshevik competetors, Kamenev and Zinoviev. In the 1920's they had been allies of Trotsky, and therefore opposed to Stalin. Worse, they both had a grassroots following of admirers who remembered their contributions in the early days of the Russian Revolution.
So it began...
1) Present a Problem: the murder of a high-ranking Communist Party leader (Kirov). Stalin didn't have to take a hit out on Kirov; he simply arranged for Kirov's personal guard to stand down when a fanatical stalker attacked.
2) Control the public/media response: Pravda and the rest of the news media responded with reports of "public outrage", and demand the killers be found and brought to justice.
3) Suggest the pre-planned government Solution: The police, firmly loyal to Stalin after years of strategic hiring and firing, link Kirov's murder to Kamenev and Zinoviev's negligence (failure to protect Kirov). A trial is planned to explore their culpability.

Now here comes the shocking part: Kamenev and Zinoviev go along with it! It was all very cynical yet predictable up this point, but I must repeat KAMENEV AND ZINOVIEV GO ALONG WITH IT! I am sure they were roughed up a bit during their interrogations, but that is not the critical factor here. Robert Conqest deftly explains that rather than stand up and defend themselves, these Old Revolutionaries perceived that exposing the trial as a political ploy would undermine public faith in the system. In other words, they were willing to sacrifice themselves to save the Party from bad PR. To Stalin, the Communist Party was just a means to an end, but to Kamenev and Zinoviev it was the "baby" they had spent a lifetime nurturing. To grease the wheels of their confessions, Stalin makes them believe they are not admitting to the actual murder, but really just to a general guilt of failing to provide Kirov with sufficient security.

Naturally, words get twisted in court... confessions and transcripts of interrogations are taken out of context, etc etc etc. Before they know it, Kamenev and Zinoviev are convicted and sentenced to execution. We see this in present times too, don't we? People choose expediency over justice, and then they're surprised when the result is expedient injustice.

Even with sentences passed, the two men relax in prison after the trial, confident that the entire show was just for public consumption. They really believed there would be some sort of intervention, followed by a brief period of exile, and then a quiet political "rehabilitation". Apparently, that sort of progression was not uncommon during the old days of the Czar.

Sorry...
In a heartwrenching scene, the guards come, and the two Old Bolsheviks realize they've been had. They were tough guys in their day; during the Revolution they no doubt faced death repeatedly in the service of their ideals. Nevertheless, when the end comes so bitterly, so unexpectedly, so coldly, they are reduced to blubbering children. And then they are uncerimoniously dispatched.

A few weeks later at some State function, Stalin relishes a retelling of their final moments by a first-hand witness.

Wave two: Same as the first, but expand the circle.
Noting the success of wave one ("beta testing"), Stalin seeks to remove the rest of his competetors.
1) The Problem: "The murder investigation of the Kirov murder has revealed evidence of a vast Trotskyite conspiracy to overthrow the entire Soviet system. Kirov's murder was actually just the first in a series of strategic assassinations designed to return the Fatherland to its old capitalist masters!" This kind of strains believability, but who was in a position to refute? In times like this, it is nice to have a curious and independent press to root out the facts and speak truth to power... you know, like we have *ahem* here in the United States? *cough* *cough*
2) The controlled response: (Pravda)- "Horrendous! We demand the NKVD spare no expense to discover and destroy the entire Trotsky network!"
3) The Solution: thousands of lesser-ranking party members are arrested. Anybody with the slightest history of opposition to Stalin (if even on just a single issue) is liquidated.

Since wave two is much broader than the first, all participants seem to accept that the police can't always be bothered with formalities like warrants, probable cause, etc. Of course the arrested and executed are replaced with members who have unblemished Stalinist credentials.

WASH. RINSE. REPEAT.
Wave three- bigger, stronger, faster. No pretense of legality this time. Stalin signs the papers, and the victims are rounded up and shot. Friends and families go to slave labor camps. There are a few perfunctory trials, but this is skipped as often as not. Too late for protest at this point. Insufficient zeal to play along is itself proof positive that you are one of "the terrorists".
Wave three is the sweep-up operation: incompetent, disloyal, or insufficiently enthusiastic Stalinists placed in power during wave two are removed.

Three waves seems to have been enough, Conquest explains. The public was sufficiently terrorized to accept Stalin's absolute dictatorship without question. His authority to arrest, try, and execute any citizen for any reason whatever was unchallenged by 1941. A baseline level of arrests continued, but no more great purges were needed.

Overall, The Great Terror is a satisfying read, and an excellent discussion of the cold, Machiavellian thinking which drove these terrible events. As cliche as it has come to sound, this book powerfully highlights Edmund Burke's somber observation "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." ( )

It is completely incomprehensible to most of us how systematic the nature of evil under Stalin can be. Perhaps only North Korea today can compare for the quantity, the extremity, and the sheer randomness of how the state chooses its victims. Authorities became criminals.

Stalin acts like a vengeful pagan god. Whole families are condemned for the imagined or perceived sins of one man. He receives lists of victims and condemns them all, signing his name across the front. Shot, poisoned, starved, humiliated, imprisoned. Old friends, allies, and even the first generation of torturers are swallowed into the abyss. Yagoda and Yezhov, the first stooges of the Great Terror, were also shot.

Why did this happen? That was the constant refrain scratched out on gulag walls or pleaded to the NKVD inquisitors. Why? Why? Why did I have to die, old friend comrade Stalin? Old comrades, military men, local politicals, intellectuals, and a random smattering of ethnicities and others all gone. Millions. Lenin and Trotsky both advocated violent upheavals, but why did Stalin pursue them with such hate?

It is more than just the political maneuverings of a dictator. It was an attempt to destroy the old state and create a new one in his image. Stalin the creator and the great destroyer. Literally any other figure which might have provided opposition is hunted out and destroyed. This ambition for absolute power is why. It is still incomprehensible.

Of course one of the great ironies of history is that these purges might not even have been necessary to fight Hitler, and in fact may have prolonged the bloody Eastern Front. Lenin's NEP might have benefitted the economy better than Stalins blood-greased slave labor projects. The Red Army fought and bled valiantly under Stalin's incompetent toadies, and some hundreds of thousands actually preferred to defect to Hitler's genocidal armies rather than continue to fight under Stalin. Only a few who survived the purges and tactics from a purged general were some of their great successes.

Conquest deserves his credit and his vindication for piecing all this together before the archives opened, and slightly before Solzhenitsyn produced his masterpiece, the Gulag Archipelago. Totalitarianism and it's evils cannot possibly be overstated. ( )

Psychopathy is usually analyzed as an individual psychological phenomenon. As we've seen, the term describes individuals without conscience, with shallow emotions, who are able to impersonate fully developed human beings and mimic feelings of love, caring and other-regarding impulses to fulfill their deviant goals: be that stealing your money, stealing your heart or both. This phenomenon becomes all the more toxic, and dangerous, when such individuals rise to national power and manage to create totalitarian regimes ruled by mind-control, deception, lack of individual and collective rights and freedoms, and arbitrary displays of power.

Psychopathic, or at least seriously disordered rulers, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Ceausescu teach what happens when (their) pathology spreads to a whole country. Given that psychopaths are estimated to be, at most, only 4 percent of the population, it's difficult to imagine how they manage to rise to positions of authority over more or less normal human beings to impose a social pathology in every social sphere: from education, to the police force, to the juridical system, to the media. Few books explain this strange and extremely dangerous political and psychological phenomenon better than Robert Conquest's classic, The Great Terror. This book traces both Stalin's rise to power within the ranks of the Bolsheviks and, concurrently, the spreading of the totalitarian system like a fatal virus throughout Soviet society (and beyond).

The book also exposes the underlying lack of principles even among seemingly ideological rulers like Joseph Stalin. When it suited his purposes, Stalin strategically oscillated siding with the left wing of the communist party (Trotsky, Kamenev and Zimonev) or the right of the Bolshevik party (Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky), turning each side against the other, to weaken them both and consolidate his own power. He surrounded himself with equally ruthless, unprincipled and sadistic individuals who did his dirty work--Yakov, Yagoda and Beria--placing them in positions of power in the NKVD, or Secret Police.

Stalin engaged in arbitrary displays of power, sending tens of millions of people to their deaths in prison or labor camps. Even his army leaders weren't spared. In a very poor strategic move that showed he cared more about acquiring total control than about his country's victory, Stalin decimated the ranks of his army elite right before the war against Hitler, when the Soviet Union would have needed them most. Nobody was safe from the gulag; nobody could maintain ideological purity. Anybody could be accused of deviationism from communist principles at any time.

Totalitarianism is a pathological system imposed upon an entire country or area. Like a disease, it spreads through the healthy aspects of society. It conditions even ordinary human beings, through the inculcation of fear and through brainwashing, to lose their conscience, their empathy and their humanity. Robert Conquest's The Great Terror is a testament to human corruptibility. This magnificent book will continue to remain historically relevant for as long as we allow disordered individuals to have power over us, our families and our social institutions.

Claudia Moscovici, psychopathyawareness ( )

After WWI many countries in Europe turned to some form of totalitarian government. The government leaders all used some form of state terror to maintain their power. After listening to this book I believe that Josef Stalin imprisoned, tortured and killed even more people than Adolf Hitler. This book is a thorough description of Stalin's terror campaign in the 30's highlighting the show trials, the purges and the labor camps. The book was written in 1960 and then revised in 1991 after more sources became available.
During his rule Stalin seemingly turned back the clock of history and ruled like a sadistic, medieval Tsar. At one point in the book he disparages criticism of Ivan the Terrible. His program of terror was greater than anything done by Nicholas II, the last Tsar. He destroyed all of his rivals and made sure that the orders of the government were followed without any questions.
The most public form of the terror was the show trials. They started in the early 30's after the murder of Kirov who was the Party leader in Leningrad. Others in the leadership were arrested and tortured until they were ready to confess to any and all of the crimes charged against them. Once someone was arrested by the NKVD it was only a matter of time. Western journalists were invited to the trials and they dutifully gave legitimacy to a proceeding straight out of Alice in Wonderland. The show trials eliminated and discredited all of the Old Bolsheviks, insuring that they could not challenge Stalin for power.
The purges were massive murder campaigns that wiped out the leadership throughout the country. Generals, scientists and engineers all read their confessions and were lead away to be shot. The labor camps were used to keep the common people in line. An unsuspecting person would be denounced by his neighbor and arrested for owning a book that had the wrong version of history. Then he was sent to Siberia to dig canals or cut down forests with little chance he would live out his sentence. His wife would be arrested and his children sent to an NKVD orphanage, no one was spared.
The author is very thorough in his description of the mechanisms of terror. There is a graphic description of the assassination of Trotsky. The only part that is not described is the torture. The author simply talks about people beaten beyond recognition. There is a lengthy description of the different diets in the labor camps. I learned how executions were done in Lubyanka prison, NKVD headquarters in Moscow. The author provides details of the Russian criminal code that made legal the crimes of the terror. There are quotes from NKVD memorandums sent throughout the country with quotas for arrests.
The worst part is that the terror was effective. The confessions at the show trials explained why there was nothing to eat. The fear of the knock on the door made sure no one complained. There was never any shortage of prison guards or prosecutors. Stalin, who was 5"3", ruled Russia from about 1927 until he died in his sleep in 1953. This book is a testament to Stalin's millions of victims. As horrible as it was it needs to be studied so that their suffering is not forgotten. ( )