Alex Goodall
Out Of The Night
The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War
By John V Fleming
W W Norton 362pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
One of the many victims of the Moscow purge trials of 1936–8 was the first assistant to the Commissar for Heavy Industry, Georgy Leonidovich Pyatakov. Pyatakov was an old Bolshevik accused of conspiring to sabotage Soviet industry as part of a Trotskyite fifth column. During his trial, an agent of the Soviet secret police named Alexei Shestov falsely testified that Pyatakov had ordered him to assassinate the Secretary of the Siberian Communist Party, Eiche. Pyatakov was found guilty and shot.
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