Talk:The Great Terror

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Talk:The Great Terror/Archive1

[edit] Historians' assessments of Conquest

Various people (usually anonymous) keep wanting to edit this article to the effect that recent historians have revised Conquest's estimates of the death toll under Stalin downwards. This may be so, but it cannot be made as an unsupported assertion. Names, publications and quotations must be cited for this claim to be established. On the other hand, as noted above, some Russian writers have revised Conquest's estimates upwards. The broader point, however, is whether a reevaluation of the history of the 1930s in the light of evidence now available in the Soviet archives in some way validates the attacks on Conquest's reputation by Soviet apologists both in the 1960s and today. Of course it does not. For a writer with no access to archival sources in the Soviet Union, Conquest did a brilliant job of reconstructing the events of the 1930s. Even if it turns out that his overall estimates were too high or (as seems more likely) too low, that is in no way a reflection on Conquest's status as a historian. Adam 11:24, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Challenge to Evil

I really have to say something in response to the semi-literate nonsense-undated and unsigned-that appears above. Conquest's work is a brilliant condemation of the horrors of Stalinism and the moral abdication-or blindness-of a whole generation of Western intellectuals. The only criticism I have is that he sees Stalin, perhaps, as uniquely malevolent, when Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik gangsters were in every way as bad. "One death", Stalin said, "is a tragedy; a million death's is a statistic". The truth of course, as anyone with any moral sense understands, is that a million deaths is a million tragedies. To try to argue that a lesser figure somehow makes the crime less heinous betrays the true rottenness at the heart of all Marxist thought. White Guard 01:15, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I removed my post as I do not wish to go into deeper discussion.Neetzach 15:16, 9 September 2006 (CEST)