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Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941, by Robert W. Thurston
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Terror, in the sense of mass, unjust arrests, characterized the USSR during the late 1930s. But, argues Robert Thurston in this controversial book, Stalin did not intend to terrorize the country and did not need to rule by fear. Memoirs and interviews with Soviet people indicate that many more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it. Drawing on recently opened Soviet archives and other sources, Thurston shows that between 1934 and 1936 police and court practice relaxed significantly. Then a series of events, together with the tense international situation and memories of real enemy activity during the savage Russian Civil War, combined to push leaders and people into a hysterical hunt for perceived "wreckers." After late 1938, however, the police and courts became dramatically milder. Coercion was not the key factor keeping the regime in power. More important was voluntary support, fostered at least in the cities by broad opportunities to criticize conditions and participate in decision making on the local level. The German invasion of 1941 found the populace deeply divided in its judgment of Stalinism, but the country's soldiers generally fought hard in its defense. Using German and Russian sources, the author probes Soviet morale and performance in the early fighting. Thurston's portrait of the era sheds new light on Stalin and the nature of his regime. It presents an unconventional and less condescending view of the Soviet people, depicted not simply as victims but also as actors in the violence, criticisms, and local decisions of the 1930s. Ironically, Stalinism helped prepare the way for the much more active society and for the reforms of fifty years later.
- Sales Rank: #1619428 in Books
- Published on: 1998-11-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .75" w x 5.98" l, .92 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
From the Back Cover
Terror, in the sense of mass, unjust arrests, characterized the USSR during the late 1930s. But, argues Robert Thurston in this controversial book, Stalin did not intend to terrorize the country and did not need to rule by fear. Memoirs and interviews with Soviet people indicate that many more believed in Stalin's quest to eliminate internal enemies than were frightened by it.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
The author is not grounded in reality
By A Customer
Robert Thurston maintains that the Stalinist terror was almost, not quite, an optical illusion. This is an example of poor scholarship, because a vast ocean of memoirs and novels of survivors reveal the horrible reality of those times. Generations of meticulous, brilliant and insightful scholars support the accounts related by survivors. Finally, the opening of the secret Russian archives provides final confirmation, if that is even needed.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A fresh look at an old story.
By R. L. Huff
Robert W. Thurston has been accused of revisionism in his reassessment of the Stalinist Great Terror. But this is a story that needs revision, in light of the sweeping generalities that have become embedded dogma in Western cold war scholarship. In this official view, Stalin is seen as the great mastermind plotting every evil that befell Soviet society during his reign. When this faith is subjected to critical analysis and does not hold up - that Stalin did not plot the great famine, or the invasion by Hitler - then the official line retreats into theories of pathology or "just plain evil." Calculations of advantage, and responses to real external events, is left out of the equation. Professor Thurston has restored the rational in his new study and is to be welcomed for said reason.
Far from "apologizing" for Stalin, Thurston seeks to place the Gensec's actions in the context of time and circumstance. Stalin counted on the class hostility of ordinary workers for Party leaders and intellectuals; in this he turned the latent anti-Communism still smoldering in the country against the purge victims and unified the country around his leadership. A very important factor, which Thurston only marginally alludes to, is the Spanish Civil War. The search for Fifth Columnists in Madrid, beginning in July, 1936, immediately inspired the same reaction in Moscow by August. This was of course a convenient cover for the "cadre revolution" he had already anticipated, but it had an objective justification for what otherwise would have been unjustifiable or even suicidal - just as the invasion of the USSR was Hitler's war cover for the Holocaust.
I recommend Professor Thurston's work as a necessary - although not perfect - antidote to the prevailing consensus of convenience among Western academics. His reconstruction of the time and circumstances is impeccable, and his detractors need to consider his closing remarks - that without the background of extreme brutalization from 1914 to 1921, Stalinism and the Great Terror were unthinkable. They were not endemic to either Russian tradition or socialist theory. "There was never a long period of Stalinism without a serious foreign threat, major internal dislocation, or both," Thurston writes, "which makes identifying its true nature impossible. . . . [its] direction broken by unplanned events. Of course Stalin contributed much to the maliciousness of the period, but he did not need to rule by terror."
Thurston concludes that the Soviet people co-determined their own fate by opportunistically siding with power. There is a warning for us in "the free world" of "the democracies" as well, for having taken a few downward steps into that cellar ourselves.
9 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
good scholarship,poor analysis and judgement
By John E. Martell Jr.
In many ways, Professor Thurston's scholarship is very credible for the time he wrote the book. But his use of sources seems very selective, facile, and often misleading. I am not an expert on Russian/Soviet history and culture, though I have read in it for almost 25 years and taught courses in Russian culture at the university. I must admit, however, that I was amazed to read his analysis of Kirov, Ezhov, and Tukhachevski, among others in the Stalinist era. They did not resemble any of the men I had read about in works by great scholars like Tucker, Volkogonov, Conquest, Orlando Figes, Hingley and Amy Knight, for example.
His portrayal of Stalin is the most incredible mish-mash of hypotheses I've read. He does admit that Stalin had, to quote him, "a suspicious mind." Suspicious mind? Surely he must be joking. What is most disturbing, and perhaps this is his own personal revisionist history, is that Stalin was merely reacting to circumstances. He, for example, dismisses the idea that Stalin had a hand in the murder of Kirov, among other reasons because Kirov got 13.5% of the vote at the party congress in '34.(True, as Amy Knight points out in her excellent book on the Kirov murder, there is no document with Stalin's name on it. But that does not mean Stalin was not responsible. Does anyone believe Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust because there is no document with his name on it?) If you assume Stalin was not paranoid as Professor Thurston seems to believe, that may be true. But if he was paranoid, for which there seems to be some very substantial evidence, then the numbers would have been more than enough to set off a purge of Kirov and his Leningrad supporters, though not necessarily the Great Terror, as Professor Figes has pointed out in The Whisperers.
Another objection I have is about how he uses sources. He claims that using one source is not sufficient evidence in one case to support one of his contentions, but he then only uses one source, and a very dubious one,to claim that Tukhachevski really had formed a conspiracy to kill Stalin!!! Though in a later paragraph, he does claim, there was the testimony of two men who had been tortured to give evidence...all of which Stalin presumably knew nothing about until Ezhov told him. It appears as Thurston imples that Ezhov was essentially duping Stalin. Or conversely trying to frighten him for unnamed reasons of his own. Poor Stalin. Who could he trust if not Ezhov? Beria? Of course, Professor Thurston offers no plausible evidence for the claim that the General's Plot, which presumably started in 1932, was grounded in reality either. And why would the generals have started to plot against Stalin then? It makes no sense, or at least he gives no real evidence or theory to explain it, unless he thinks they were all Trotsky dupes. (But to show Stalin's good will, Professor Thurston mentions two commanders who were saved in the purges!!!)
And that is the problem with the book. Alas, here is an academic with the ability to produce a scholarly work that deserves genuine credit for scholarship, but that draws the most extraordinary and unsubstantiated conclusions.
Perhaps, though, we have all been wrong? Unlike Roosevelt and Churchill, who more or less thought that Uncle Joe was really not a bad guy, the rest of us have been mistaken to think Uncle Joe was not actually such a nice guy after all, with his "suspicious mind"?
Were were the editors at Yale on this book?
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