The Great Terror

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