Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Roy Medvedev's momentous study of Stalinism, Let History Judge, was first published in the West in 1971, readers marveled. How could a Soviet citizen, laboring in Russia, have produced a work so rich in documentation, so scrupulous as scholarship and, above all, so harrowingly vivid in its recounting of the calamities inflicted by Stalin on his country? In the West there was nothing to rival it in scope. In the Soviet Union, where the book circulated among scholars, it restored a long-abandoned standard of professional integrity to Soviet historiography. As one Russian practitioner lamented, "Stalin beat...
...paid a stern price for publishing his book abroad. He was threatened with arrest, and his files were seized by the KGB in 1971 and again in 1975. His phone was cut off for a year, and all his international mail was confiscated until 1987. Still, many witnesses to Stalin's crimes, heartened by news of the book, offered Medvedev a bonanza of new information. Old Bolsheviks who had suffered at the dictator's hands came to Medvedev's Moscow apartment to bring him the unpublished memoirs they had squirreled away in despair. Victims of the Great Terror and their...
Medvedev likes to quote another historian, Jules Michelet, who defined his profession as "the action of bringing things back to life." Scarcely anyone does that better than Medvedev. All existing portraits of Stalin, even one drawn by a great novelist like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, seem bland in comparison with the real-life killer who charges through the pages of Let History Judge. Although the statistics amassed by Medvedev are overwhelming -- he conservatively estimates that no fewer than 5 million Soviet citizens were arrested from 1936 through 1938 -- it is the telling human detail that brings alive Stalin's wickedness...
Medvedev shows the dictator and his secret-police chief during the Great Terror as they sat for hours hunched over the lists of hundreds of names Stalin would okay for execution, one by one, before the working day ended. Stalin was fond of lavishing kindness on his friends, even as he meticulously planned their arrests, torture, trials and death. When one high official, I.A. . Akulov, received a near fatal concussion while skating, Stalin rushed foreign doctors to the U.S.S.R. to treat him. As soon as the skater recovered, Stalin had him shot...
...modern Soviet era began on the night of June 3, in the city of Fergana (pop. 190,000), 150 miles southeast of Tashkent, as bands of native Uzbeks staged a series of brutal attacks on minority Meskhetian Turks, who were deported from Georgia in 1944 by Joseph Stalin. Most of the 190,000 displaced Meskhetians settled in Uzbekistan, a region that did not always welcome their presence...