The Great Terror A Reassessment

"It's hard to overestimate the impact that Robert Conquest's extraordinary study had on the West's perceptions of Soviet history. Using rare Soviet materials, some published during the Khrushchev thaw, others in self-published samizdat format, the British historian put together an authoritative chronicle of Stalin's murderous reign. Western communists and fellow travelers dismissed the book as propaganda. But when Soviet archives were partially opened in 1991, Conquest's estimates of 700,000 "legal" executions during 1937-38 -- and of the total number of other deaths thanks to the Soviet terror campaigns ("hardly lower than some fifteen million") -- were proven chillingly accurate." -- Owen Matthews, N/A, Wall Street Journal

"Anthony Powell once wrote of Robert Conquest that he had a 'capacity for taking enormous pains in relation to any enterprise in hand.' It is beyond dispute that, forty years after the publication of The Great Terror, this judgment requires no reassessment."--Michael Weiss, The New Criterion

"The volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn."--Christopher Hitchens, Wall Street Journal