Reviews

Stalin has had the reputation of ruling the U.S.S.R. with an iron fist, employing terror to inflict his will on a hapless populace. Accordingly, Stalin was also a paranoid monster who stage-managed the twists and turns of Soviet policy that made him supreme leader. In this strongly revisionist work, Thurston, associate professor of history at Miami University, tries to refute that conception, arguing that Stalin was largely reacting to events around him. The author goes so far as to claim that, though terror existed as part of the Soviet system, Stalin never meant it to be a primary instrument for ruling. Thurston has surveyed recently opened Soviet archival material and other sources and interpreted them his way, conjecturing that in the late 1930s-the period of the Great Terror-"events spun out of... control," catching Stalin off-guard and forcing him to improvise. Whether one accepts what will surely be a highly controversial reassessment, the author acknowledges Stalin was nonetheless "one of history's leading murderers, and his crimes were grotesque." Photos. History Book Club selection. (Apr.)

Thurston (history, Miami Univ.) challenges conventional interpretations of the Soviet purges of the 1930s. Instead of treating Stalin as a master schemer committed to the extermination of multitudes of imagined opponents, he organizes evidence from scholarly and primary sources, some recently opened, to portray Stalin as both an initiator and a reactor to events who relied heavily upon his chief of the NKVD, the internal security force. Thurston examines the psychology of the Soviet citizenry, emerging from revolution and civil war, and identifies a genuine basis for a fear of opposition groups. The author finds his argument supported in the loyalty of the Soviet population to Stalin with the advent of World War II, which contravenes the examples of Soviets welcoming German troops cited in standard histories. For Thurston, Stalin's Terror reflected that of his people, and they supported him. This is a well-written and thought-provoking study for scholars in the field and subject collections.-Rena Fowler, Humboldt State Univ., Arcata, Cal.