Suggested Readings: The Red Death

Gulag: A History
By Anne Applebaum
ISBN: 0-7679-0056-1

"What is remarkable is that the facts about this monstrous system so well documented in [Anne] Applebaum's book are still so poorly known and even, by some, contested. . . . Compared with the volumes and volumes written about the Holocaust, the literature on the gulag is thin. In one meticulously researched and well-written account, [Applebaum's] book makes an enormous contribution to filling the void."
—Michael McFaul, associate professor of political science at Stanford University

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
By Stéphane Courtois et al.
ISBN: 0-674-07608-7

"Courtois and his colleagues have taken a first, bold step to end this ignorance [of communism's crimes]. But they have done so without illusions. [In his foreword,] Martin Malia predicts a 'very Long March indeed before Communism is accorded its fair share of absolute evil.' Perhaps he is right. But at least now, when our children one day ask what the Cold War was about, we can hand them this book."
—Marc A. Thiessen, "Why We Fought," National Review

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
By Robert Conquest
ISBN: 0-19-504054-6

"One of the few unalloyed pleasures of old age is living long enough to see yourself vindicated. Robert Conquest is currently enjoying this pleasure. . . . His best-known works—Kolyma (1978), The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), The Great Terror (1990)—laid bare the system of terror and extermination at the heart of the Communist state. He wrote them at a time when détente with the Soviet Union was the fashion. . . . Soviet Communism, Conquest argued, must either live by expansion or die of its contradictions."
—Michael Ignatieff, "The Man Who Was Right," New York Review of Books

Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
By Joshua Muravchik
ISBN: 1-893554-45-7

"Muravchik has given us a history of the socialist movement since the late-eighteenth century, told primarily through profiles of selected theorists, agitators, and leaders, 'each of whom,' he writes, 'exemplifies a critical stage or form in its evolution.' One can argue about influential figures whom he did not select . . . but one can hardly argue about whom he did select: Engels and Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Mao, and Gorbachev, to name some of the universally known, as well as 'Gracchus' Babeuf, Robert Owen, and Julius Nyerere, to mention a few of the lesser known."
—Howard Dickman, "The Parasites' Paradise," Navigator