At an exhibition in Paris, Dalrymple finds that the photographs of people condemned to death during the Soviets’ Great Terror of 1937-38 stops people in their tracks. Even more poignant are the letters they wrote in their final days, letters he finds “deeply moving on the one hand and an astonishing testimony to the blindness of the faith revolutionaries can have in their own worldview on the other”.

Dalrymple at New English Review