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overdetermined. One of the more interesting questions might therefore be not why the terror campaign against the military leadership was launched in 1937 but why the hammer had not fallen earlier. Whitewood has a surprising answer to this question: Stalin. Even at the very end, he argues, the fact that the doomed generals were demoted nearly two weeks before they were arrested suggests that there was some restraining force at play. With the top Stalinists in the Red Army (K. E. Voroshilov and S. M. Budennyi) already on board with the purge strategy and NKVD chief N. I. Ezhov insistently ringing alarm bells, who else could have slowed the process down? Who else indeed. On this point, as on several others, Whitewood is in the realm of informed speculation. The most revealing archival documents Whitewood deploys are the ones showing the persistence of Civil War conflicts in the bureaucratic struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. There are no smoking guns showing exactly why the final decision was made to arrest the army leadership, and we should not expect them. Or rather, Whitewood argues that we ought to take seriously the language of the terror documents we already have. Yezhov pursued the commanders and Stalin authorized their execution because both believed that there really was a military conspiracy sponsored by domestic and foreign enemies. He thus aligns himself with scholars who argue for a reactive model in which Stalin ordered the terror out of panic rather than Machiavellian calculation. One might have wished, though, for a bit more engagement with the rest of the recent literature on the Great Terror to flesh this out more. One wonders, say, whether Whitewood’s reactive and fearful Stalin fits into or complicates Timothy Snyder’s argument that Poles were disproportionately targeted in the Terror. These, presumably, are directions that future scholars can pursue, and they will be glad to have this volume as a resource when they do so.