This collection of essays by scholars from five nations - the United States, Great Britain, Australia, France, and Russia - makes several major contributions to the understanding of Stalinist terror in the 1930s. The essays explore in greater depth than before the background of the terror and patterns of persecution, while providing more empirically founded and substantiated estimates of the numbers of Stalin's victims. Some contributors tap unexplored or underutilized source materials while others have taken advantage of glasnost and the opening of Soviet archives and libraries for the years...