Ebook: Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession

THE authors of this book (who for their own safety must conceal their real identity under the above pseudonyms) are a Soviet historian and a German scientist who were victims of the great Yezhov Purge in Russia in the late 1930’5 and were confined for many months in Soviet prisons. Of their bona fides there can be no possible doubt. Other prisoners have survived to tell their story, but here for the first time are two men with the mental equipment to look beyond their personal experience to the larger and lasting issues and to examine them dispassionately. Thus the account of the purge as observed by them throws a blinding light on the whole nature of the Soviet State. The authors are wary of conclusions and in many cases the reader must draw his own; but from their own focus on the (continued on back flap) NKVD they are able to illumine for the bewildered observer the question of the strange confessions that still pour from the lips of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The Purge, say the authors, is of necessity a recurrent feature in the Soviet police state. We may expect at any time to see another one, possibly in a different form. Hence the urgency and importance of a book which is a potent and permanent aid to western understanding of the Russian situation.