Volume 39, Number 18 · November 5, 1992
Invitation to a Beheading
By David Remnick
Stalin: Triumph & Tragedy
by Dmitri Volkogonov, edited and translated by Harold Shukman
Grove Weidenfeld, 642 pp., $29.95
A few days after the collapse of the August coup in Moscow last year, reliable sources in the Russian government said the KGB had for months been burning archives in underground furnaces. But even the celebrated efficiency of the secret police was no match for their own graphomania. In Moscow and in cities across the former Soviet Union, there are tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of documents describing the crimes, decisions, and trivia of the regime. When it came time to cover its tracks, the KGB found itself with too much paper to burn. Top-secret files at Lubyanka were always stamped 'khranit' vechno'—to be preserved forever. Historical memory is not so easy to erase.
Review, 5854 words
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