Reviews for Strange Case of Pot

The average rating for Strange Case of Pot based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-14 00:00:00 Tammy Wilson Amongst my other reading at present I�ve been working my way through Robert Conquest�s classic The Great Terror>, an exploration of the Stalinist purge in Russia in the mid-1930s. I�ve reached the most terrible phase of that terrible part of the nation�s history, the so-called Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD, the Soviet security police. It�s difficult to know how the nation was able to survive the ever growing spiral of denunciations, arrests and executions, embracing the whole of society, high and low, in and out. It�s difficult to know how people, ordinary people, could go to sleep at night, knowing that they might very well be visited by the secret police in the early hours of the morning, their favourite time. It�s difficult to know how Russia avoided a collective breakdown in the midst of this horror. Here�s one story that caught my attention, a demonstration of the manic stupidity of the whole period, the kind of thing that emerged in the process of lunatic denunciations. It concerns one Sylakov, a deserter from the Red Army. He gave himself up in Kiev claiming that, for whatever reason, that he had been involved in an anti-Soviet plot. He told of a planned raid on a post office in which he had a leading part, intended to provide funds for a terrorist cell. This was not enough for the NKVD, so after a good kicking, he implicated the whole of his old military unit, right up to the commanding officer. The attacks planned were not now on a post office, no, but on government leaders. Following this almost the whole of his unit was arrested, from the commanding officer right down to the drivers, wives included. Sylakov�s family were also drawn in, his two sisters, his father and his old and crippled mother. So, too, was an uncle, who had only ever met his nephew once. The said uncle was discovered to have served once as a corporal in the old Imperial Army, and was immediately promoted by the NKVD into a Tsarist general! As with a rock thrown into a silent pool, the rings grew ever wider as this absurd tale progressed, embracing more and more, to the point that every cell in Kiev prison was occupied by someone implicated in the �Sylakov Plot.� But no sooner had the intensity of the Terror slackened with the fall of Yezhov in late 1938 than the NKVD began to re-examine the whole case, now a complete embarrassment. The suspects were all interrogated again, with a view to getting them to withdraw their forced confessions. Some, fearing a trick, refused and had to be given another kicking, to get them to reject statements that carried the death sentence! Is there any greater madness than this?

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-21 00:00:00 Jd Williams Which is more terrifying? Stalin's 1936-38 terror, or Western liberals' inability to recognize it? Updating his original work "The Great Terror" with a vast amount of new data, Conquest scrupulously details and puts into context the purges themselves: the many players and defendants, the shifting political cross-currents, the rounds of trials and arrests. And he does the same for the many Western observers - intellectuals, writers, journalists, and left activists - who were oblivious to it or actively sought to hush it up, even decades later when there were no longer any shreds of doubt. This is the equivalent of Holocaust denial. And a Holocaust it was. While left-wing apologists pooh-poohed the numbers of purge deaths as in the thousands, the estimates of those killed politically in the people's progressive utopia are now solidly in the eight figures, with as many as 15 to 20 million arrested and executed, or worked to death in the camps, in the years up until Stalin's death in 1953. As many more died were starved by the Communists in the Ukraine to break the peasantry a few years earlier. Yet most people seem never to have heard of any of this. As much as I wanted to enjoy this book for it's profound historical importance, I found it difficult to get through it. As a historian and documentarian, Robert Conquest is unrivaled. As a writer, he doesn't make it easy on his readers. This book is probably more suited to be an academic reference than a consumer market book. The author goes into fascinating detail about how the depraved mind of Stalin might have processed perceived threats to his power and gives a palpable feel for what those who lived during this era must have felt. He goes into thought provoking detail about just how maniacal and pervasive the purge mentality became. No one was trusted, not even those closest to Stalin. It seems that just about anyone was liable to be arrested and executed just for making the wrong glance. He also demonstrates how and why the purges increased exponentially, leading to millions of Russian citizens going to prison, or their deaths, on absolutely no basis of criminal wrongdoing. Overall, the book has a cohesive structure from one chapter to the next, but all too often the author tends to give a dry recitation names, dates, and facts with little contextualization. He also assumes the reader has some familiarity with Russian politics and institutions. Many of the terms specific to Russia and the period covered are mentioned but never explained very well, if at all. Despite these minor flaws, Conquest did a tremendous job in researching and uncovering the magnitude and details of Stalin's Great Terror. No other account prior to this gave a glimpse of just how extensive Stalin's campaign of terror and suppression was. This is without question the definitive book on the Stalinist purges.