Robert Conquest The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford University Press, 570 pages, $24.95
When The Great Terror was first published in 1968, it immediately established itself as a classic of modern history. Never before had we been given so complete an account of the criminal actions taken by Stalin in the 1930s to secure his absolute rule of the Soviet Union. Mr. Conquest’s detailed chronicle of the assassinations, arrests, tortures, frame-ups, forced confessions, show trials, executions, and incarcerations that destroyed millions of lives and held an entire society in a state of abject fear and servitude was all the more impressive because of the need, at that time, to rely so largely on what the author calls “unofficial material.” “As with the writing of ancient history,” he remarks in the preface of this new edition of The Great Terror, “it was a matter of balancing and assessing incomplete, partial, and uneven material—and not, as with the writing of modern Western history, the deployment, in addition to these, of adequate and credible official archives.” The result was a triumph of historical analysis.
The Great Terror was, moreover, a unique book at the time of its initial publication, and remains so today. As Mr. Conquest notes with justifiable pride in this new edition:
During the years since [its first publication], The Great Terrorremained the only full historical account of the period—as, indeed, it does to this day. It was received as such not only in the West but also
