The Great Terror

The Great Terror:
Stalin’s Purges of The Thirties
Published 1968
By Robert Conquest

This landmark account of Stalin’s brutal reign of terror in the 1930s is also available in a 2007 40^th anniversary ‘A Reassessment’ edition, which includes data not available to Conquest in the 1960s. There are no certain figures for the human toll of Stalin’s murderous purges, but Conquest estimates as many as 20 million people living under Stalin lost their lives. In many ways Stalin’s regime was the logical outcome of an ideology that justified any action by its rulers in the name of building Socialism and creating a Communist state. There was no higher power. No morality. No rule of law. Only the exercise of absolute power.