Let History Judge

This weighty--physically and emotionally--book speaks volumes about the play of individual and group memory in a totalitarian society. It grew from notebooks and files secretly kept by the Russian historian Roy Medvedev on the history of his times, from the emergence of Josef Stalin as a leader in the 1917 Revolution to the dictator's death in 1953. Some of the documents Medvedev gathered, including memoranda on secret agreements with Nazi Germany, shocked Russian readers when these notebooks first began to appear in 1988, and his book became one of the primary documents of glasnost.