Au delà du débat sur les thèses de Getty, ce document fait comprendre, en partie, l'horreur du régime communiste où l'individu ne compte plus.

The Road to Terror Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939

J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov
Translations by Benjamin Sher
1999 History 688 pp. 42 illus. 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, ISBN 0-300-07772-6 $35.00

"This documentary collection, continuing Yale's pioneering Annals of Communism series, tackles questions surrounding the paroxysm of the purges in 1937-38. . . . The 200 documents here will astonish anyone familiar with the era."-Booklist

"This volume contains some fascinating archival texts, especially Politburo material setting purge victim quotas for cities, towns and villages to be fulfilled by the NKVD (the secret police). There are 199 documents reprinted from declassified Soviet archives. They are utterly frightful to read."--Arnold Beichman, Washington Times

"[Getty and Naumov] provide commentary on hundreds of top-secret Soviet documents from the 1930s, assembled and translated here into English for the first time. . . . Both exposes and confirms a dark chapter of Soviet history."--Publishers Weekly

The vast and complex tragedy of Stalin's purges, culminating in the Great Terror, made victims of millions of Russians between 1932 and 1939. This gripping book assembles and translates into English for the first time an astonishing array of formerly top secret Soviet documents from that period. Exposing to daylight the hidden inner workings of the Communist Party and the dark inhumanity of the purge process, these documents immeasurably deepen our understanding of an agonizing episode of Soviet history.

From dossiers on the liquidated Soviet elite to police reports of peasant unrest to private letters from victims and purgers to secret transcripts of Central Committee meetings, the nearly two hundred documents presented here confirm Stalin's role as executor of the terror. Yet the top party elite, or nomenklatura, were also key to the unfolding of a terror that proceeded with fits and starts, moves and countermoves, and steps toward and away from the abyss. From 1932 to early 1937 Stalin and the nomenklatura agreed on the need to destroy all dissidents, to stage show trials, to carry out mass arrests, purges, and shootings, and to prevent any resistance to these "cleansings." Eventually deep insecurities that magnified any opposition and iron discipline within the party led the nomenklatura to support Stalin in purging their own colleagues, and in 1937 and 1938 they serially voted one another into prison.

"A riveting collection of documents and incisive commentary, The Road to Terror dramatically captures as no other work possibly can the brutality, belief, fear, zealotry, and betrayal that led to the purges and mass killing of the Stalinist 1930s." --Larry E. Holmes, University of South Alabama

"This is the most inclusive set of original materials that we have on the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930s. These extraordinary documents give voice to much that has remained hidden in the Soviet past." --Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago

"This documentary collection, continuing Yale's pioneering Annals of Communism series, tackles questions surrounding the paroxysm of the purges in 1937-38. . . . The 200 documents here will astonish anyone familiar with the era." --Booklist

J. Arch Getty is professor of modern Russian history at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Soviet history. Oleg V. Naumov is deputy director of the Moscow archive RTsKhIDNI.