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
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.
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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