One of the constants that I've noticed for many years is the near total ignorance that so many of us have about Russian/Soviet 20th Century History. It seems there has been more interest in soap operas and sitcoms than in the trials and horrors of the vast nation that was our cold war enemy for so many years. Having read dozens of great books on the wars, revolutions, famines etc. of the recent Russian past, it was great to run across one that brought it all together, even if this huge story on occasion becomes macabre in it's deathly persistance. For all those horror fans out there, try this book, and you'll really get a dose of the real thing. Suffering and tragedy completely foreign to most of us. Say the seige of Leningrad during WWII (barely known here), where a great city the size of Chicago loses over a million civilians, more than all the casualties of all the American wars.If you can find a copy, grab it!

Not many people realize that over 50 million Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, etc. lost their lives unnaturally at the first half of the 20th century. This book, however unbalanced by its constance reference to the Orthodox Church and other mistakes, should be applauded by taking this grim statistic and analyzing its effects on the minds and mentality of the Soviet people. These facts have been hidden behind the Iron Curtain far too long for Westerners to be so blissfully ignorant. Bravo to Catherine Merridale for writing this excellent book.

This is the most moving and memorable book I've read for many years. The scope is breath-taking, no less than an investigation of the Russian attitude to death, and ways of coping with it, from the late Czarist times to the present day. Given Russia's ghastly 20th century history the story is a terrible one and at many places in the book one has to pause, quite overcome by pity and emotion. Horror is piled on horror, though never for the sake of shock, yet the overriding feeling on finishing the book is of amazement at the resilience and nobility of the human spirit. The countless instances of cruelty, misery and waste, on a scale incomprehensible in a Western country, are matched by an even greater number of cases of endurance and triumph, if not physical, then spiritual. The overriding impression is of hell let loose on earth, not once, not transiently, but repeatedly, sustainedly, of millions dying, suffering and degraded in the process and yet of the survivors maintaining humanity, generosity and hope. Stupidity, prejudice and bull-headed arrogance all play their role in the story but more terrifying still is the sense of conscious, deliberate distancing from all human compassion that underlay so many of the man-made tragedies described. It is inappropriate to say that anyone will enjoy reading this wonderful book but they will be thrilled, moved and possibly changed by it. Other than by Zoë Oldenbourg's unforgettable novel "Destiny of Fire" I have never been so disturbed and challenged by a single book.