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Scorched Earth: Stalin's Reign of Terror . By Jörg Baberowski . Trans. Steven Gilbert , Ivo Komljen , and Samantha Jeanne Taber . New Haven : Yaleￂ University Press , 2016. x, 500 pp. Notes. Index. $40.00, hard bound.
Book Reviews
This volume in the Yale Hoover Series in Authoritarian Regimes promises a reappraisal of the Soviet era from 1917 to 1953. It offers a radically different interpretation of Soviet history to that provided in the author's Der rote Terror (2003) which was based on Zygmunt Bauman's reading of Nazism and Stalinism as perverse products of twentieth century modernization. Scorched Earth, in dramatic contrast, draws on a much older conception of the Soviet regime as a terroristic, totalitarian, police state, with Iosif Stalin, as a psychopathic despot, thirsting for total control and displaying a criminal relish in his exercise of power.
The book comprises in the main of a litany of crimes and atrocities, at the center of which is a graphic account of the Great Terror of 1936-38. The picture that it draws creates an overpowering sense of a terroristic regime. This is...