Wednesday, August 1, 2018

DNF: "Agents of Terror" by Alexander Vatlin

DNF: Agents of Terror: ordinary men and extraordinary violence in Stalin's Secret Police by Alexander Vatlin. Edited, translated and with an Introduction by Seth Bernstein. 2016, 9780299310806.

A look at Stalinist purges at the ground level. The men who did the local dirty work. I just never got into the book and it was sitting around at home forever. I read the Foreword and learned a decent amount from that. Especially how people would turn on their neighbors. How secret police officers would strive to meet quotas by grabbing convenient victims. How interrogations were torture sessions and confessions were bullshit. Kangaroo courts with quick convictions and sentences.

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