The Great Terror; A Reassessment
New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. viii, [2], 570. [4] pages. Occasional footnotes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Minor soiling. George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was an English-American historian. Conquest was noted for his works on Soviet history including The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968). In 1948 Conquest joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a "propaganda counter-offensive" unit. In 1956, Conquest became writer and historian. In 1968, Conquest published his best-known work, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, the first comprehensive research of the Great Purge, which took place in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1939. The book was based mainly on information which had been made public, either officially or by individuals, during the so-called "Khrushchev Thaw" in the period 1956–64. It also drew on accounts by Russian and Ukrainian émigrés and exiles dating back to the 1930s, and on an analysis of official Soviet documents such as the Soviet census. The most important aspect was that it widened the understanding of the purges beyond the previous focus on the "Moscow trials" of disgraced Communist Party leaders such as Bukharin and Zinoviev. More