Book Review Excerpt

The following excerpt is from a review of my second book, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999). The review is in the April 2001 issue of Canadian Journal of History. The author of the review is A.B. Pernal a professor of Russian and Eastern European History at Brandon University in Canada.

Ethnic Cleansing is not a product of Pohl's personal research in the Russian archives; it is, rather, chiefly a synopsis of the accomplishments of the late Soviet and new Russian historiography since 1989. His book does contain certain deficiencies. Nevertheless, it still has to be considered a valuable addition to the English-language historiography relating to the terrible developments in the Soviet Union under Stalin. It is much more valuable than the two existing scholarly books devoted to this subject matter in English -- Robert Conquest's The Nation Killers (1970), and Aleksander Nekrich's The Punished People: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (1979) - for neither of their authors had access to most relevant archival documents. Pohl's book should inform both the academic community and the general public about the true policy of the Stalinist regime toward the "Repressed People" in the Soviet Union.