CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Robert Conquest
Dedication
Title Page
Foreword by Anne Applebaum
Introduction to 2008 Edition
BOOK I, THE PURGE BEGINS
Introduction, The Roots of Terror
1 Stalin Prepares
2 The Kirov Murder
3 Architect of Terror
4 Old Bolsheviks Confess
5 The Problem of Confession
BOOK II, THE YEZHOV YEARS
6 Last Stand
7 Assault on the Army
8 The Party Crushed
9 Nations in Torment
10 On the Cultural Front
11 In the Labor Camps
12 The Great Trial
13 The Foreign Element
14 Climax
BOOK III, AFTERMATH
15 Heritage of Terror
Epilogue, The Terror Today
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Additional select bibliography for 2008 edition
Index
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror is the book that revealed the horrors of Stalin’s regime to the West. This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
One of the most important books ever written about the Soviet Union, The Great Terror revealed to the West for the first time the true extent and nature Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, in which around a million people were tortured and executed or sent to labour camps on political grounds. Its publication caused a widespread reassessment of Communism itself.
This definitive fiftieth anniversary edition gathers together the wealth of material added by the author in the decades following its first publication and features a new foreword by leading historian Anne Applebaum, explaining the continued relevance of this momentous period of history and of this classic account.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Conquest (1917 – 2015) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest historians of the Soviet Union. Publication of The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties in 1968 brought him international renown, as did his revelatory later history The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine published in 1986. As well as holding academic posts at various universities, including the London School of Economics, Columbia University and Stanford University, he was an acclaimed poet, critic, novelist and translator.
Also by Robert Conquest
Non-fiction
Power and Policy in the USSR
Common Sense about Russia
Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair
Russia after Khrushchev
The Great Terror
The Nation Killers
Where Marx Went Wrong
V. I. Lenin
Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps
Present Danger: Towards a Foreign Policy
We and They: Civic and Despotic Cultures
What to Do When the Russians Come (with Jon Manchip White)
Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics 1936–1939
The Harvest of Sorrow
Stalin and the Kirov Murder
Tyrants and Typewriters
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
Stalin: Breaker of Nations
Reflections on a Ravaged Century
The Dragons of Expectation
Poetry
Poems
Between Mars and Venus
Arias from a Love Opera
Coming Across
Forays
New and Collected Poems
Demons Don’t
Verse Translation
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Prussian Nights
Fiction
A World of Difference
The Egyptologists (with Kingsley Amis)
Criticism
The Abomination of Moab
For my sons, John and Richard
FOREWORD
BY ANNE APPLEBAUM
