Scorched Earth
Stalin's Reign of Terror
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
German scholar Jörg Baberowski is one of the world’s leading experts on the Stalin era, but his work has seldom been translated into English. This book, an unremitting indictment of the mad violence with which Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, depicts Stalinism as a cruel and deliberate attack on Russian society, driven by “totalitarian ambitions” and the goal of modernizing and rationalizing a backward people. Baberowski takes a twofold approach, emphasizing Stalin’s personal role and responsibility as well as the continuity he sees in Communist aims and ideology since 1917. Unlike recent apologist accounts that focus on the challenges of modernization or on the operational complexities of managing the Soviet state, this hard-hitting analysis unequivocally locates the origins of the terror in the culture of violence and the techniques of power. Detailed, well-documented, and including many new details on the workings of the Stalinist state, this powerful work encompasses the dictator’s brutal reign from his achievement of total power in 1929 to his death in 1953.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baberowski, professor of Eastern European history at Humboldt University in Berlin, analyzes the Stalinist system in what is arguably the most comprehensive and perceptive volume of its kind in the West. He begins with a brief, brilliant study of the nature of Stalinist violence. Stalin detached violence from communist ideology, making violence "subject to the purposes of the dictator alone" and a continuation of "the tsarist project of registering, homogenizing, and subjugating" the empire's subjects. This practice was developed in a culture of civil war that produced "a synthesis of delusions and excessive violence" and a generation of functionaries to implement them. They could control their regime by force, but not the general population. The result was a "dictatorship of subjugation" that violently disciplined people who "were nothing more than raw material from which New Men were to be sculpted." Power and propaganda produced a "public world of lies and a private world of truth," in which "no one was able to protect themselves from persecution." Any hope that the violence "served a higher purpose" was trampled as domestic terror expanded through endemic deportation and murder. Baberowski's chilling account of Stalin's system shows how the country cannibalized itself as one man sought total power.
