Amazon Review of "A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia"

The case against the Evil Empire, September 6, 2003

By C.J. Griffin (Little River, SC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Hardcover)

This is one of the best and most important books ever written on the Soviet Union, which is exposed here as a blood-soaked totalitarian tyranny every bit as nefarious as Hitler's Third Reich. Yakovlev, once a prominent member of the Soviet elite and architect of "perestroika" who is now head of the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, demolishes the revisionist history coming from Gregory L. Freeze, J. Arch Getty, Robert W. Thurston and others. He is in a better position to know what happened than anyone else, considering he has been going through the archives for the last ten years. This makes A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia the most damning indictment of Soviet Communism since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's monumental work of history, The Gulag Archipelago.
Yakovlev confidently states with absolute certainty that the number of people murdered by the Soviet state for political reasons or who perished in camps/gulags or in state-enforced famines is around 30-35 million - with a total of 60 million dead if you include those who perished during the second world war, in which Stalin is partly responsible for being foolish enough to form a pact with Hitler and paranoid enough to butcher tens of thousands of his military elite, leaving his country open to attack. The clergy were subjected to the most bestial of atrocities: priests, monks and nuns were crucified on the central doors of iconostases, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled with priestly stoles, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were executed in 1918 alone. Besides the clergy and military elite, other victims of Soviet Communism include: peasants (many millions), the intelligentsia, returning Soviet POW's, whole ethnic groups (Crimean Taters, Don Cossacks, Chechens, Volga Germans, Kalmyks, etc.), even so-called "Socially Dangerous Children."
Yakovlev also tackles one of the great myths about Soviet Communism: Good Lenin/Bad Stalin. Lenin was no big-hearted idealist concerned for humanity, but a fanatic and a cold-blooded murderer, willing to kill off millions of his fellow countrymen in the name of the "revolution." Yakovlev quotes the murderous orders Lenin issued: "impose mass terror immediately, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who have been getting soldiers, former officers, and so on drunk. Not a minute's delay." "Hang (by all means hang, so people will see) no fewer than 100 known kulaks, fat cats, bloodsuckers." "launch merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards. Suspicious individuals to be locked up in concentration camp outside city." In 1919, Lenin ordered the Cheka (Bolshevik secret police) to execute those who did not show up for work on a particular religious holiday. As Yakovlev shows, Stalin simply picked up where Lenin left off.
I absolutely urge anyone interested in the bloody history of the 20th century to read this book.