RUSSIA UNDER STALIN
By
Like others in this series of British imports, this is not a collection of source materials per se, but a narrative history composed around selected quotations. Gibson citations include Victor Serge on Party policies, Evgenia Ginzburg on the Terror, John Scott (Behind the Urals) for an outsider's observations on life in the newly constructed factory center of Magnitogorsk, and of course Khrushchev and Stalin. The result is a balanced account which includes the post-revolution trend back to conservatism in education and morality, the rapid if rocky course of industrialization, the resistance to collectivization, and the purges. The immediacy of the first person accounts is heightened by an excellent selection of documentary photographs.