Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Klimov Gregory
Title : The terror machine The inside story of soviet administration in Germany
Year : 1958

Link download : Klimov_Gregory_-_The_terror_machine.zip

Preface by Edward Crankshaw. The now we know a good deal about the brutalities inflicted by the government of the Soviet Union upon those who incur its displeasure. The independent testimonies of survivors add up to a circumstantial and terrible indictment, so that it may be fairly said that anybody who still denies the evidence is the sort of person who would deny anything-or the sort of person who, to preserve his own illusions, will stop his ears to the cries of the dying and condemned. Where we are less well informed is about the effect of the regime on the great mass of Soviet citizens who have managed to keep out of serious trouble. It is not enough to be told by Soviet refugees what Russia looks like through spectacles acquired in Paris, London, or New York. We want to know what it looked like when they were still in Moscow, Odessa, or Novosibirsk, before they began to dream of escaping to the West, or at least before they knew enough about the West to make comparisons. This is not idle curiosity: it is the only way of getting even a faint idea of how the r6gime appears to those who must still live under it. Major Klimov's book is very helpful in this matter. It is a sober, yet vivid, account of life as lived inside the Soviet bureaucracy seen, as far as it is possible for an outsider to judge, very much as it appeared to the narrator before he decided to break away-as it must therefore appear to countless other intelligent Russians who are engaged at this moment in making the machine work. And this account has an added value because in these pages the machine is seen functioning not in the mysterious hinterland of the Soviet Union, where anything may happen and where events cannot be related to life as we know it, butin the middle of Western Europe, on the familiar ground of occupied Germany. Major Klimov and his colleagues at the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin were grappling not with Russians but with Germans. ...