Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book contains many interesting anecdotes about life in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s until the outbreak of World War II. However, its fundamental arguments -- that the Great Terror was not so great nor even truly a terror -- are badly flawed. The principal problem is that the author spends far too much effort knocking down straw men. Among other things, he attempts to argue that the Soviet Union was not a totalitarian regime, the basis for this being that it did not achieve absolute control over every aspect of Soviet life. But if this is the test, not even the society in Orwell's "1984" was totalitarian, since free thinking was still possible, even if severely punished when caught. If the standard is set so high, the word becomes useless. He also argues that the Terror was not really a terror since its only goal was not the random creation of fear in society. Thurston appears to believe that a true terror could not arise if many of the participants and victims were involved because they actually believed the skewed form of "reality" created by Stalin and his cohorts. Further, Thurston at times almost sounds like an apologist for Stalin & Company, hinting for instance that the rooting out of Trotskyists had some justification in the fact that a "bloc" of like-minded supporters of Trotsky and his policies actually existed and communicated with one another. There are plenty of similar issues and problems with this book which I will not detail. I do not recommend it except as a source of anecdotes for the point that Stalin's terror was not all it might have been.
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