Title: Interesting if flawed history of Stalinist terror
Product review: Robert Thurston has written an interesting --if flawed--history of the Stalinist terror. Correctly criticizing previous histories of the period, Thurston falls into the trap that awaits most revisionist historians: he spends more time looking for information to disprove their arguments than building his own case. A major problem is the author's use of Soviet archival material. Dr. Thurston uses Soviet statistics to build his case often neglecting their obvious bias. For example, he notes that only 63,889 people were arrested for counterrevolutionary crimes in 1939 (119), while later noting that in the same year more than a million Poles from the eastern Ukraine were deported to Siberia (218). Nevertheless, the book is important for students and academic interested in the impact of the terror on Soviet society.
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