One good rule is that the language in Soviet secret documents ordering that action be taken is usually valid, while other information may be mere Par… - Robert Conquest

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One good rule is that the language in Soviet secret documents ordering that action be taken is usually valid, while other information may be mere Party-line myth—as with the 1933 secret instructions to blockade the Ukraine and the Kuban to prevent famine victims escaping northward. The operational order was intended to be obeyed, and it was. The explanation given was false: that the peasants were acting on instructions of Socialist Revolutionaries and the Polish intelligence service.

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About Robert Conquest

George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British-American historian and poet known for his works on Soviet history, including The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s first published in 1968.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Native Name: George Robert Acworth Conquest
Alternative Names: J. E. M. Arden Ted Pauker

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Additional quotes by Robert Conquest

As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was a
contribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.

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