This volume in the Yale Hoover Series in Authoritarian Regimes promises a reappraisal of the Soviet era from 1917 to 1953. It offers a radically different interpretation of Soviet history to that provided in the author's Der rote Terror (2003) which was based on Zygmunt Bauman's reading of Nazism and Stalinism as perverse products of twentieth century modernization. Scorched Earth, in dramatic contrast, draws on a much older conception of the Soviet regime as a terroristic, totalitarian, police state, with Iosif Stalin, as a psychopathic despot, thirsting for total control and displaying a criminal relish in his exercise of power.

The book comprises in the main of a litany of crimes and atrocities, at the center of which is a graphic account of the Great Terror of 1936–38. The picture that it draws creates an overpowering sense of a terroristic regime. This is an unqualified intentionalist interpretation of Stalinism. There is little attention to periodization, context, constraints, or discussion of dilemmas or difficult choices. The claim that the period was punctuated by periods of relative moderation (1922–28, 1934–36) is given short shrift. Stalin's “reign of terror” mercilessly continued what had been initiated by Vladimir Lenin. The book offers nothing that might in any way exculpate the regime. There are no achievements to be mentioned: the defeat of Nazi Germany is recounted without any reference to the economic and political regime imposed on the USSR from 1928 onwards. The burdens of industrialization, rearmament, and post-war reconstruction are not discussed. The claim of some leading historians that the Great Terror was motivated by the need to eradicate a fifth column in anticipation of war is summarily dismissed; the terror was simply a process of political, social, and ethnic cleansing. The fifth column thesis may have been overstated but it cannot be rejected in so cavalier a manner.

This broad brush approach employs blunt categories of inquiry, where terms are used for their pejorative weight rather than for their analytical precision. In the same paragraph Stalin is described a dictator, a despot, and a tyrant with no differentiation between terms. Stalin, it is argued, was driven by paranoia but was also a psychopath. The leadership is generally referred to as “Stalin and his acolytes” with no attempt made to explore how the ruling group functioned over time or the tensions within it.

Scorched Earth as a work stands alongside other works of modern scholarship such Le Livre noir du communisme (edited by Stephane Courtois et. al., 1997). Stalinism is depicted as a lapse into Asiatic barbarism. The parallels between the Soviet and the Nazi regimes are clearly drawn. Germany and Europe had every reason to fear communism and for that reason many preferred to rally behind any force that was capable of containing this threat. In this sense, Stalinism and Nazism had a symbiotic relationship.

Baberowski characterizes the Soviet population under Stalin simply as slaves. Differences in the experience of the urban as opposed to the rural population, of the regime's beneficiaries as well as its victims, are not explored. The high regard in which Stalin is still held by Russians is explained as a psychological defense mechanism. The victims of totalitarian terror find compensation for their suffering as victors over a common foe in 1945, imbuing their suffering with meaning and purpose, while absolving their tormentors of blame. In this, we have the cyclical aspect in Russian history, with its cultural reinforcement for authoritarian rule. This oversimplified, polemical view of state-societal relations in the Stalin era allows no scope for a more complex or nuanced interpretation of popular attitudes to the regime or of the role of patriotic sentiments.

Baberowski hails Nikita Khrushchev, the author of De-Stalinization, as the man who delivered the Soviet people from the trammels of the terroristic police state. Scorched Earth offers a blistering attack on the “revisionist” school of Soviet history that is now so dominant in the west. This is a welcome corrective to any attempt to gloss over the horrors of the Soviet past, but Baberowski throws out the baby with the bath water. There is no engagement with serious economic, social, or political studies of the Stalin era. This is history as moral indictment.