Ebook: On Stalin and Stalinism

In the years since the appearance o£ Roy Medvedev’s Let History Judge, the first major study of the Stalin era from within the Soviet Union, much new material has come his way, notably on Trotsky through the US publication in Russian of the ‘Bulletin of the Opposition’. On Stalin and Stalinism is both an important supplement to the earlier work and a book that stands in its own right. The author does assume a basic familiarity with events, yet this is appropriate since his intention is to highlight certain problems, to add new details, and to correct what in his view are distortions of fact or errors of judgement. The book is unique in that it gathers information from sources which could only be available to a Soviet author while at the same time, though living in the Soviet Union, Medvedev has managed to have access to much of the literature on Stalin published in the West. He quotes at length the first-hand stories of survivors who called on him, and the result is an assessment of Stalin’s character and actions which is striking in its colour and authenticity. The extraordinary range of materials at his disposal make his work one of the more remarkable documents to come out of the Soviet Union in recent years.