Ebook: The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny

The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny is an extraordinary book of historical revelation, a searing criminal indictment, told from the inside of Soviet history. Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko is truly a child of the Bolshevik Revolution (and its traumatic outcome). His father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, led the Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917 and went on to become a famous Soviet military leader, political figure, diplomat. He was finally killed in Stalin's purge of the late thirties. The official rehabilitation of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, in 1956, was one of the first acts of Khrushchevs deStalinization. Now his son, Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, almost totally blind and a survivor of many years in Stalins prisons and concentration camps, tells the story of Stalin from personal experience. The fate of the Soviet Union under Stalin-as well as the official silence that again enshrouds the man Antonov-Ovseyenko denounces as a gangster- has led him to write a remarkable and unique book: "It is the duty of every honest person to write the truth about Stalin," he says. "A duty to those who died at his hands, to those who survived that dark night, to those who will come after us." A professional historian since he was freed in the 1950s, the author has made use of family connections and other special circumstances to get access to previously unknown sources-some obviously high ranking-and to personal testimonies on his subject. He has unearthed a wealth of new and startling information about Stalin and his long, despotic rule-Stalins rise to dictatorship, his private life, his brutal assault on the peasants during collectivization, his plotting of the Kirov assassination, the great terror of the ( continued on back flap) 09191881 (continued from front flap) 1930s, the actual number of his millions of victims, the catastrophic pact with Hitler and subsequent failure to prepare for the German invasion in 1941, his last years as a virtual god, and, finally, his bizarre death. The Time of Stalin is a book for everyone interested in the tragic events surrounding his tyranny and their continuing political legacy today. The author's vivid and impassioned narrative makes the portrait accessible to the general reader, and its richness of fresh detail makes it essential reading for the specialist. The book also includes a large collection of rare photographs, many of which have never appeared outside the Soviet Union.