Tales From The Crypt.(Books; RUSSIA)(Book review)

Byline: Andrew Nagorski

Recently released documents from the Soviet archives reveal a wealth of buried atrocities.

Joseph Stalin never had any problem finding willing executioners. Everyone from his Politburo colleagues to the secret-police rank and file dutifully carried out his wishes during the Great Terror of 1937a38, when approximately 700,000 people were shot in assembly-line executions. It was a huge job, and no one was a more enthusiastic organizer than Nikolai Ezhov, the head of the NKVD, as the secret police was then called. But when, predictably, the killing frenzy began consuming the executioners themselves, Ezhov didn't go gracefully. "He started to hiccup, weep, and when he was conveyed to 'the place,' they had to drag him by the hands along the floor," a witness recalled. "He struggled and screamed terribly."

Since the Soviet archives yielded massive quantities of newly declassified documents in the 1990s, scholars have been sifting through them to find those kinds of previously unknown stories, or new details that cast well-known events in a new light. "Lenin's Brain and Other Tales From the Secret Soviet Archives" by Paul R. Gregory (164 pages. Hoover Press) draws on the author's experiences presiding over a team of scholars who have mined the Hoover Institution's extensive collection of documents from Soviet state and party archives. The result is an enticingly short sampler of stories that offer a glimpse into how the Soviet system worked in all its chilling inhumanity.

The executions of 21,857 Polish POWs and civilian officials, captured when the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east in 1939, serve as a telling example. Known as the Katyn Forest massacre for the location where 4,421 of the Polish POWs were shot in 1940, this grisly event proved too big to cover up. A Soviet commission claimed the Poles were killed by the Germans after they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. As late as the 1990s, even Mikhail Gorbachev, under pressure from the Poles, gave only a partial admission based on "newly discovered evidence" that had been there all along. The Katyn files in the Soviet archives, all labeled top secret, offer incontrovertible evidence that Stalin and other Soviet leaders ordered the executions, and then orchestrated the cover-up.

That practice of denying the seemingly undeniable was commonplace. After Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, executed President Hafizullah Amin and installed a puppet regime, Soviet propagandists came up with talking ...