Rating: 
Summary: Superb Description of a Dictator's Spinmastery
Review: As someone familiar with Russian history, I enjoyed this book. Among others, it debunks the myth that Stalin was weak and out of touch at the time of his death. The fact is he was clearly in control up until the time he died. Reading this book also raises more questions than it seems to answer. For example, how does this plot fuse with his foreign policy? The military? Was this strictly an internal affair or actually a prelude to Nuclear War with the United States? Although beyond the scope of this book, the reader was left wondering how Khruschev, Beria, Malenkov, et al worked out power arrangements after Stalin's death. We know, of course, that Beria was shot in December 1953; but what formed the BASIS for each person's power in what was clearly a lawless state?
Rating:
Summary: Harrowing, unforgettable, a vital addition to Soviet studies
Review: Brent's and Naumov's harrowing, unforgettable account of an episode which has been rather slighted in most English-language literature on Uncle Joe - after all, the 1930s <I>Yezhovshchina</I> offers more obvious possibilities for vivid character-delineation than do Stalin's postwar antics - suggests that the Big Kahuna was even more dangerous, if possible, than one had ever suspected. A caveat: this is <I>very</I> dense prose, not for persons who want merely a Monarch-Study-Notes type of guide to the topic. Although gripping, the result is somewhat turbid. This is one of the two reasons it gets four stars rather than five. (The other is, couldn't we have had some pictures?) Clearly the research involved was prodigious, and - to complicate matters for the tyro - by 1948 most of the leading dramatis personae from early Stalinist days were either pushing up the daisies or, like Molotov, in temporary eclipse. So most readers will need to do as I did: look up the list of personalia in the back of the book to remind themselves, every so often, just whom they are reading about. That said, <I>Stalin's Last Crime</I> could well be a masterpiece. The best volume of its kind in our language since <I>The Black Book of Communism</I> was translated from the French? I, for one, am prepared to say a tentative yes.
Rating:
Summary: Harrowing, unforgettable, a vital addition to Soviet studies
Review: Brent's and Naumov's harrowing, unforgettable account of an episode which has been rather slighted in most English-language literature on Uncle Joe - after all, the 1930s Yezhovshchina offers more obvious possibilities for vivid character-delineation than do Stalin's postwar antics - suggests that the Big Kahuna was even more dangerous, if possible, than one had ever suspected.
A caveat: this is very dense prose indeed, not for persons who want merely a Monarch-Study-Notes type of guide to the topic. Although gripping, the result is somewhat turbid. This is one of the two reasons it gets four stars rather than five. (The other is, couldn't we have had some pictures?) Clearly the research involved was prodigious, and - to complicate matters for the tyro - by 1948 most of the leading dramatis personae from early Stalinist days were either pushing up the daisies or, like Molotov, in temporary eclipse. So most readers will need to do as I did: look up the list of personalia in the back of the book to remind themselves, every so often, just whom they are reading about.
That said, STALIN'S LAST CRIME could well be a masterpiece. The best volume of its kind in our language since THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM was translated from the French? I, for one, am prepared to say a tentative yes.
Rating: 
Summary: Stalin's Last Crime
Review: Fascinating well researched subject matter but somewhat ruminative and tedious. I found that could skip through many pages and find that the same events were being described yet again.
Rating: 
Summary: Paper trail to nowhere
Review: For all its admirably meticulous documentation, this book does not pierce the mystery of the Doctors Plot. For all the correspondence, interrogation transcripts and memos excavated from the Soviet archives, one archive remains forever closed: Stalin's implacably bloody mind. Brent and Naumov chillingly recreate the omni-paranoiac climate among the Soviet leadership in the late Stalin era. These people had survived wildly irrational purges in the Thirties, but they best of all knew on what shaky ground they stood. Any hint of independence, any perceived threat to Stalin's dominance, could land them in the execution cellars. The trouble is, Stalin rarely confided his plans to paper, so there is no smoking gun to be found. This sheaf of documentation fleshes out what the people involved said, certainly, and when they said it. But as the authors admit, they are not really much closer to learning the purpose of the whole grim charade. We don't even get as much detail in some instances, such as the Stalin-ordered murder of the prominent Soviet theater director Solomon Mikhoels, as was available in some Soviet-era books. The elusiveness of the authors' task is illustrated by their use of sources. In addition to the archival material, they draw material from the memoirs of Molotov, Khrushchev, and retired NKVD assassin Pavel Sudoplatov. The authors are perfectly above board about the general unreliability of these memorists, so it says something that, even with the availability of the archives, they are reduced to consulting those books. This admirable but ultimately unsuccessful book demonstrates the enduring mystery of the evil of Stalin.
Rating:
Summary: Paper trail to nowhere
Review: For all its admirably meticulous documentation, this book does not pierce the mystery of the Doctors Plot. For all the correspondence, interrogation transcripts and memos excavated from the Soviet archives, one archive remains forever closed: Stalin's implacably bloody mind. Brent and Naumov chillingly recreate the omni-paranoiac climate among the Soviet leadership in the late Stalin era. These people had survived wildly irrational purges in the Thirties, but they best of all knew on what shaky ground they stood. Any hint of independence, any perceived threat to Stalin's dominance, could land them in the execution cellars. The trouble is, Stalin rarely confided his plans to paper, so there is no smoking gun to be found. This sheaf of documentation fleshes out what the people involved said, certainly, and when they said it. But as the authors admit, they are not really much closer to learning the purpose of the whole grim charade. We don't even get as much detail in some instances, such as the Stalin-ordered murder of the prominent Soviet theater director Solomon Mikhoels, as was available in some Soviet-era books. The elusiveness of the authors' task is illustrated by their use of sources. In addition to the archival material, they draw material from the memoirs of Molotov, Khrushchev, and retired NKVD assassin Pavel Sudoplatov. The authors are perfectly above board about the general unreliability of these memorists, so it says something that, even with the availability of the archives, they are reduced to consulting those books. This admirable but ultimately unsuccessful book demonstrates the enduring mystery of the evil of Stalin.
Rating:
Summary: Mind-Boggling Examination Of Stalin's Final Terror!
Review: Some very interesting books are emerging concerning the former Soviet Union now that their archives are open for scholarly investigation. This book is certainly one of them, a well-written and carefully documented investigation of one of the darkest aspects of the Stalin era. No one, with the possible exception of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany, was directly responsible for the deaths of more human beings during the 20th century than was Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union's first comrade, a brilliant psychopath so deluded in his paranoid fantasies that he suspected everyone, always, of continuous conspiracy and perfidy against him. His resulting excesses included the campaign of terror, first instituted in the 1930s, and the systematic purges that became an integral aspect of the terror campaign. During the 1930s alone, he is estimated to have worked millions to death in enforced labor camps, creating what is now described as a "Gulag" in recent books such as Anne Applebaum's recent book of the same name. Yet although the Gulag and the terror campaign that supplied the bodies for its proliferation was most pronounced both before and during the Second World War, it was after the war that the extent of his murder and mayhem reached it horrific peak. Indeed, on the eve of his death in 1953, Stalin was actively planning to execute a bizarre and insane plan to kill hundreds of thousands of additional Russian citizens in what Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov describe in their book, "Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against The Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953" as constituting what they refer to as the "Doctor's Plot". The authors trace the evidence linking Stalin and the development by his staff produced false documentation of such a plot by doctors within the Soviet Union of intending to purge the Soviet Ministry of Security as well as the elite elements of government in a bizarre alleged conspiracy between Jewish M.D.s living in Russia and the American government to foist a coup d'etat of the Soviet regime. Stalin had concocted the idea based on the fact that he knew the lingering anti-Semitism within the Soviet Union would help convince the people that such a plot was both feasible and logical, which of course, it was not. What it really was a clever Machiavellian ruse to give Stalin the excuse he needed to purge the very institutions he was about to accuse the Jewish doctors of attempting to damage. In their stirring narration of the events and their consequences, the authors offer both provocative and damaging evidence of the standard Stalin course of action; by first obtaining a series of forced confessions, he would develop asset of anecdotal information files that he would then twist into a substantial set of circumstantial evidence supporting his theory. One of the more interesting of the findings was he evidence that late in life he seemed to develop a more cautious and deliberate approach to his domestic terror program, as though he sensed the overall mood of the country to have changed in the direction of wanting and supporting legitimacy, and he wanted to continue to ensure his power base both by working within the framework of what he believed to be the public consciousness on the one hand, and undermining his imagined foes by creating the docile of false evidence he could use to disarm and defeat them on the other. Most fascinating of the authors' theories is the idea that in attempting to foist yet one more purge on the feckless party hierarchy, Stalin set the stage for his own demise, which the authors argue may well have been a disguised assassination and not the natural death the rest of the outside world was led to believe it was. This is a wonderful book, and I am sure it is only the latest of what promises to be a steady stream of excellent books rewriting the history of the Soviet experiment with new information coming from the treasure trove of the Soviet archives. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Impressive research, but tedious to read
Review: The doctor's plot would make an interesting 30 page chapter in a larger book on Stalin's life, but there's just not enough material of interest for it to sustain a 300+ page book. There is quite a bit of repetition and tedious exploration of obscure documents and characters. The author demonstrates that the book is well researched, but in this case that does not translate into a well crafted story.
Rating:
Summary: Impressive research, but tedious to read
Review: The doctor's plot would make an interesting 30 page chapter in a larger book on Stalin's life, but there's just not enough material of interest for it to sustain a 300+ page book. There is quite a bit of repetition and tedious exploration of obscure documents and characters. The author demonstrates that the book is well researched, but in this case that does not translate into a well crafted story.
Rating: 
Summary: Offers new light on the Doctor's Plot & Stalin's death
Review: This book will change the way that anyone thinks about the doctors plot. It has new evidence to the poisoning of Stalin (probably by Beria) and also opens up documents lost in KGB archives since the death of Stalin. It is very well written and is worth the making of a movie for because of all the newly unveiled plot sequences. For example- General Vlasik was questioned by KGB because they thought all the people with lines next to their names in his address book were spies. It turns out that he changed all of his many lovers names to their masculine form (which is very easy in Russian) so that his wife wouldn't know and he put lines next to their names so that he'd know which ones they were. Come on people that's great! But that's far from the best here. This has all of the correspondense between Timashuk and KGB higher-upers, all the interrogation files of the Jewish doctors, everything you could possibly want to know about the Doctor's Plot and don't get any of the other books on it. Trust me, they're all lies. This is the real deal.
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