Loyal Comrades Ruthless Killers by Slava Katamidze

A reviewer
A reviewer, A reviewer, 12/05/2007

If the book were a speech that Katamidze was giving, he wouldn’t breathe once. After finishing LCRK, an interested reader will be disappointed that this was not written in several volumes of the same length as the entire text. Ten chapters and two hundred twenty five pages do not seem like enough space in which to capture nearly eighty years of history of an organization as important and impacting as the KGB. There is obviously much more information and Katamidze, though eloquent and natural in his writing for the most part, squeezes a lot of information into very finite book covers. There is a toss-up pro and con to this outcome. The influx may make readers scratch their heads, close the book, and say, “I didn’t retain anything from this big red book.” This is problematic, but not shocking. While the information may cause a few heads to spin if the readers are unacquainted with the subject, once hooked, some interested readers will not want to put it down, may read it a second time, and will still be asking questions about certain gaps in history and data. This many cause them to go out and research the subject ad nausea until they can actually pronounce each name of every figure (and there are hundreds) mentioned within the text. As a side note, Katamidze provides a glossary of terms commonly used throughout the book. (Bravo, Katamidze.) In short, Slava Katamidze’s book is a good starting point to a very broad, circuitous, and corrupted subject. It succeeds in sparking interest in Russian relations and history, and seems to (as much as it can, more or less) accurately portray the information. The subject of Soviet terror is one that should be approached with an open mind, a sound stomach, and a solid amount of patience. Katamidze definitely raises the “iron curtain” for his readers, but by no means closes it. Further reading is needed to get any sort of grasp on what the terror, the government administrations, the “secret” organization, the history of Russia and the USSR really wrought.