Nearly three million people endured it; just under half of them died. For twenty-five years the distinguished journalist and historian Harrison Salisbury pieced together this remarkable narrative of villainy and survival, in which the city had much to fear-from both Hitler and Stalin.

    The internationally known historian Roy Medvedev has included more than one-hundred new interviews, unpublished memoirs, and archives from survivors of Stalin's death camps. This updated version of a classic work was written during a time of great change in the Soviet Union. With the advent of perestroika and glasnost, more progressive leadership has sought to demolish the Stalinist system which had finally crippled the Soviet Union and incited public discontent.Let History Judge contains new material on purges in 1929-1931 and terror against the peasantry; the Kirov assasination and show trials; the "great terror" from 1936-1938, which caused irreparable damage to the Soviet Union and left it vulnerable for Hilter's attack in 1941; the trial of Bukharin; Trotsky's revolutionary activity and Stalin's involvement with his murder in Mexico; Stalin's miscalculations and errors during the war, which cost the Soviet Union nearly 25 million in casualties; new purges from 1946-1953; and the actual vote of the Seventeenth Congress, which decided Stalin's candidacy.Since the first edition was finished by the author in 1969 and published in 1971, dozens of new informants have come forward to give their evidence to Roy Medvedev. Distinguished Soviet literary, cultural, and political figures like the late Alexander Twardovsky, Ilja Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov, Yuri Trifono, Mikhail Romm and many others have accumulated documentary records of Stalinism in anticipation of an expanded version.

    With this bon mot the average curiosity about the Tsars' government was satisfied and there seemed to be no need to look further into the matter. There was, on the surface of things, some justification for such a definition: many rulers had suffered violent death and little did the autocracy abate between 1725 and 1905. The impression created by travelers, by historians and journalists, as well as by Russia's own discontented intelligentsia was that nothing really ever changed in Russia, that the autocracy was the same in 1905 as it had been at the death of Peter the Great in 1725. Not that the outside world had remained ignorant of the efforts at reform, the changes, and the modernization wrought in Russia since the day Peter I had "cut a window into Europe. " But the prevailing opinion was that such changes as occurred were merely external and did not affect the fundamental structure of the government or of society.