The Time of Stalin [antikvár]

THE SURVIVOR AS HISTORIAN (Introduction) Stephen F. Cohen Professor of Soviet Politics at Princeton University It would have been better to tell everything. Murder will always out. —Khrushchev Remembers The reader is opening a book about terrible historical crimes. Its style and contents are not the product of academic dispassion but of personal experience, forbidden research, and anger that these crimes are still covered up by the Soviet government. It is a book written, the author tells us, as "a duty to those who died to those who survived to those who will come after us." Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko is a sixty-year old survivor of the Stalinsh-china—or "the time of Stalin." Some Soviet citizens see in the Stalin years only a mountain of national achievements; others see in them a mountain of crimes. The first view can be debated, but the second cannot be denied. Stalin's policies caused a Soviet holocaust, from his collectivization "pogrom" against the peasantry in 1929-33 through the relentless mass terror that continued until his death in March 1953. Millions of innocent men, women, and children were arbitrarily arrested, tortured, executed, brutally deported, or imprisoned in a murderous system of prisons and concentration camps. No one has yet managed to calculate the exact number of deaths. Among those who have tried, twenty million is a conservative estimate, excluding the twenty to thirty million who died during World War II. For a brief time after Stalin's death, it seemed possible that the Soviet government would admit and repudiate these crimes, however episodically. Official revelations about the recent past, or de-Stalinization, began with Khrushchev's assault on the Stalin cult at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress, in 1956, and reached a crescendo with his public revelations at the Twenty-second Congress, in 1961. But they ended shortly after Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964. Since that time, the Brezhnev leadership has refurbished Stalin's reputation as a great national