Centre-Local Relations in the Stalinist State 1928-1941 Book

This book was a difficult one to get through but not because the material was boring. Rather it was the horror of the history that often caused me to put the book aside for awhile and come back to it weeks later. Fascinated by history, particularly Russian history, I wanted to read about the resistance that took place in Estonian when the Soviet Union took over in 1944. The stories are fascinating, people living in underground bunkers in the forest of Estonian to avoid capture and offer resistance to the Red army. At first the resistance waited and hoped for assistance from the West. This assistance, obviously, never came.

One of the most horrible accounts was the mass deportation that occurred in the spring of 1949. They rounded up over 20,000 people in a systematic way over just a few days. With just an hours notice, these so called "enemies of the state" (a majority being women and children) were loaded into sleds and taken to the trains and carried off to Siberia.

Just a warning on the writing style: It is written like many non-fiction books with the purpose of documenting facts and not to be creative or entertaining.

A main theme of this book would be: Communism is bad :)