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THE ROAD TO TERROR

STALIN AND THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF THE BOLSHEVIKS, 1932-1939

A further batch of remarkable documents from the archives of the Soviet Central Committee, including secret transcripts of their meetings, police reports, and even the last letters of Bukharin and Yezhov (the head of the NKVD during the Terror) before they were executed. Getty (Modern Russian History/Univ. of Calif., Riverside) and Naumov (deputy director of the Moscow archive) have performed a real service in producing these archives, though a less satisfactory job in explaining them. In truth, the documents, revealing though they are—they include the ruthless interrogation of Bukharin by the Central Committee, and the quotas of those to be shot for each republic—are almost as revealing for what they are not. They are almost devoid of any utterance (at least on the part of the Stalinists) that is not phrased in the most vituperative and unconvincing propagandistic terms. The authors are persuasive in showing that Stalin seemingly had no fixed plan of terror, that he frequently tried to show moderation, and that he procrastinated, particularly in deciding Bukharin’s fate. They are considerably less successful in arguing that “even Politburo members seem to have genuinely believed that myriad conspiracies existed,” largely on the basis of the fact that the implacable Molotov continued to argue for them in them in the 1970s. The sheer extent and absurdity of the charges (that veterinarians were engaged in a massive effort to sabotage animal husbandry, for example) suggest a different and simpler explanation, that of stark fear and self-preservation. The authors argue against a complete acceptance of the fear theory by claiming that the Politburo members were “hard men,” but the pleas sent by Bukharin and Yezhov to Stalin to spare their lives suggest the reverse. Nonetheless, one of the most revealing and chilling books to have emerged from the outstanding efforts of the Yale Annals of Communism Series. (42 illustrations)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-300-07772-6

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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