Volume 12, Number 12 · June 19, 1969
On Dictatorship
By Alexander Gerschenkron
The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties
by Robert Conquest
Macmillan, 633 pp., $9.95
Robert Conquest's impressive book is not a definitive study of the crimes perpetrated by the Soviet dictatorship during the limited period between the murder of Kirov (December 1934) and the fall of Yezhov, the chief of the secret police, four years later. A truly definitive study cannot be undertaken without access to the relevant Soviet archives. Since it is most unlikely that such archives will be opened as long as the Soviet dictatorship persists, and since much of the material may have, or will have, been destroyed, the likelihood is that full light will never be cast on what was far and away the most horrible period in the history of the country whose annals are not distinguished by the absence of savage brutality and murderous cruelty.
Review, 3819 words
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