TY  - BOOK
AU  - Whittock,Martyn J.
TI  - The secret history of Soviet Russia's police state: cruelty, co-operation and compromise, 1917-91 
SN  - 9781472142405
PY  - 2020///
CY  - London
PB  - Robinson
KW  - Police
KW  - Soviet Union
KW  - History
KW  - Intelligence service
KW  - Politics and government
KW  - Social conditions
N1  - Includes bibliographical references and index; The roots of Lenin's dictatorship -- The start of 'Red Terror', September-October 2018 -- Civil war and mass violence, 1918-22 -- A return to normal in the 1920s... but what is normal? -- A forgotten 'genocide'? The Ukrainian famine -- The revolution starts to turn on its own -- The 'Great Terror', 1937-8 -- Empire of repression: life in the Gulag system -- The secret police in the Great Patriotic War (1941-5) -- Bringing Eastern Europe under control after 1945 -- The post-war repression and the death of Stalin -- Rebuilding repression, from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s -- From Gorbachev to Putin: the end of the USSR and its secret police state -- The ghosts of history: the continuing influence of the Soviet police state
N2  - Citizens of the West have, for the most part, been told a very simplified story of the repressive 'totalitarian' state that was the USSR. In fact, it was sustained by more than just policing and force. No amount of revisionist history can erase the reality of millions controlled, imprisoned and killed, but there was much more to the USSR's one-party state than this. Whittock tells a more complex story of the combination of cruelty, co-operation and compromise required to build and run a one-party state. Much of this is the story of the role played by the secret police in creating and sustaining such a form of government, but it is much more than simply a 'history of the secret police'. This is because the 'police state' which emerged (in which dissent, both real and imaginary, was undoubtedly policed, threatened and ruthlessly eliminated) was more than just the product of the arrests, interrogations, executions and imprisonments carried out by the secret police. The USSR was also made possible by a battle for hearts and minds which led millions of people to feel that they really had benefited from the system and had a stake in the new society
ER  -