Books, Arts & Manners

Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934—1941, by Robert W. Thurston (Yale, 296pp., $30)

IN his Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941, Robert W. Thurston argues that “Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder from 1934 to 1941.” Thurston is thus very much a “revisionist”—although, as Stephen Cohen has pointed out, today the word is a euphemism. What was called revisionism in the past accepted the data, old or recent, and reinterpreted them; and while there are, of course, “revisionist” scholars of Soviet matters who have enlarged our perspective in that way, now the term, as Cohen notes, usually applies to a particular school of thought that has accepted falsification, dismissed established evidence, and misinterpreted newer materials.

RC

About the Author

Robert Conquest

Featured Tags

Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934—1941, by Robert W. Thurston (Yale, 296pp., $30)

IN his Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941, Robert W. Thurston argues that “Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder from 1934 to 1941.” Thurston is thus very much a “revisionist”—although, as Stephen Cohen has pointed out, today the word is a euphemism. What was called revisionism in the past accepted the data, old or recent, and reinterpreted them; and while there are, of course, “revisionist” scholars of Soviet matters who have enlarged our perspective in that way, now the term, as Cohen notes, usually applies to a particular school of thought that has accepted falsification, dismissed established evidence, and misinterpreted newer materials.