In This Review

Stalin's Masterpiece: The Show Trials and Purges of the Thirties-The Consolidation of the Bolshevik Dictatorship
Stalin's Masterpiece: The Show Trials and Purges of the Thirties-The Consolidation of the Bolshevik Dictatorship
By Joel Carmichael
St. Martin, 1976, 238 pp

This history of Stalin's "charades" does not rival Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, but Carmichael is always interesting and he skillfully illustrates his argument that the entire enterprise reflected not just Stalin's paranoia but the logic of the Soviet system.

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