Moscow, 1937

An award-winning account of Stalin's reign of terror when 1. 5 million people lost their lives in a single year. Karl Schlogel reconstructs the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the 'Great Terror'.

List of contents

Preface x
 
Acknowledgements xiii
 
Reproduction Acknowledgements xvii
 
Translator's Note xx
 
Introduction 1
 
1 Navigation: Margarita's Flight 10
Margarita's fl ight - Manuscripts don't burn: a writer in 1937 - Relief map of the city, locations, staging posts - Dramatis personae and their portrayal: dual characters - NKVD, the organization - 'People vanished from their apartments without trace' - Sudden deaths, execution as spectacle - 'It can't be!'
 
2 Moscow as a Construction Site: Stalin's General Plan in Action 33
Aleksandr Medvedkin's film New Moscow - A new cityscape: Stalin's General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow - Moscow as a construction site: between demolition and new construction - Moscow beyond the ring roads - Human landscape, struggle for survival
 
3 A Topography of the Disappeared: The Moscow Directory of 1936 54
Snapshot of the status quo: directories as documents of their age - Topography of power and other locations - Traces of the disappeared - Lists of people to be shot and the posthumous reconstruction of their addresses
 
4 The Creation of Enemies: The Criminal Prosecution of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre, 19 - 24 August 1936 68
World-historical criminal cases: the rhetoric of the fi rst Moscow show trial - The echo of violence: how a latent civil war comes to be articulated in language - 'Double-dealers' - The birth of the show trial from the spirit of lynch-law - The ideal enemy
 
5 'Tired of the Effort of Observing and Understanding': Lion Feuchtwanger's Moscow 1937 81
A key scene in European intellectual history: Feuchtwanger's meeting with Stalin - The impotence of the anti-fascist movement: how to generate a point of view - The end of the fl âneur: journey in the shadow of the NKVD - The phenomenology of confusion and the creation of unambiguous meaning: credo quia absurdum - Leave-taking at Belorusskii Station
 
6 In the Glare of Battle: Spain and Other Fronts 95
Moscow maps: the scene is Spain - A world in meltdown, war scare - The Soviet nation as a patriotic fi ghting unit - Metastases: show trial in Barcelona, the NKVD abroad - Barcelona transfer: Moscow experiences
 
7 Blindness and Terror: The Suppressed Census of 1937 109
A journey into the interior of society - 6 January 1937: snapshot of an empire - Ten years after the census of 1926: balance sheet after the Great Leap Forward - Self-analysis, self-education, data acquisition - The shock of the missing millions - Statistics as crime
 
8 A Stage for the Horrors of Industrialization: The Second Moscow Show Trial in January 1937 125
'The Business-like atmosphere' - The language of expert witnesses - The topography of the Five-Year Plan - Human sacrifi ce, nemesis, chorus - Postscript
 
9 'A Feast in the Time of Plague': The Pushkin Jubilee of 10 February 1937 144
The New York Times: 'All Russia was Pushkin-mad today' - 'Comrade Pushkin': consecration of a classic - A feast in the time of plague: coded discourses - Platitudes of a new culture - Russian genius and imperial rule
 
10 Public Death: Ordzhonikidze's Suicide and Death Rites 160
The shock: Sergo is dead - Escape into ritual - Suicide as a weapon - A hopeless situation and protest - Death as a group experience: speaking of death in times of mass murder
 
11 The Engine Room of the Year 1937: The February-March Plenum of the Central Committee 177
A leadership at its wits' end: the voice of panic - Testing the limits and exceeding them: the Party indicts Bukharin and Rykov - The shock: 'universal, free, secret elections' - Audit report: ungovernability and fear of chaos - Wreckers at work in the NKVD - The dissolution of the Party and the creation of a new one - Setting the machinery in motion
 
12 Moscow in Paris: The USSR Pavilion at the International E

About the author

KARL SCHLÖGEL is Professor of Eastern European History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt. Moscow, 1937 was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2009.

Summary

* An award-winning account of Stalin s reign of terror when 1. 5 million people lost their lives in a single year. * Karl Schlogel reconstructs the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the Great Terror .

Report

Winner of the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding
"An almost impossibly rich masterpiece. The density and seriousness, the deliberation and literary art of this exhilarating tour de force testifies to the enduring value and purpose of that perhaps now-vanishing triumph of the human intellect, the book."
The Atlantic, best five books of 2012
"A dizzyingly brilliant panorama of the enormous variety of events and processes unfolding in Moscow between 1936 and 1938. Schlogel succeeds admirably - indeed, better than any historian to date - in reproducing the atmosphere and grotesque contradictions."
Times Higher Education
"Exceptionally readable. An extraordinary, thought-provoking masterpiece."
Literary Review
"An excellent and original book. Not only is it a highly detailed account of a city in turmoil (containing many more fascinating stories than a review can ever do full justice), but it reveals clearly how 1937 was a year of extreme contradictions"
Europe/Asia Studies
"Schlögel's total history of Moscow during the fateful year ranks among the best of Sovietology."
International Affairs
"No book could be more equal to the task of restoring Stalin's victims to Western memory than Schlögel's Moscow, 1937 - it is an extraordinary work of scholarship, prose and remembrance."
Times Literary Supplement
""A brilliant achievement of historical writing, one that can be read profitably by specialist and the general reader alike."
American Historical Review
"Schlogel's comprehensive overview gives a profound overall view of what it was like to live in such a crucial place in such a crucial year."
Dublin Review of Books
"It is great. Moscow, 1937 teaches us that life goes on as usual, even in the midst of great catastrophe, but it also teaches that great catastrophe can look a lot like life going on as usual."
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Compelling in every way, the book startles the mind and stirs the imagination in the way that only poetry and music can sometimes do. An instant classic."
Wichita Eagle
"Karl Schlögel's Moscow 1937 draws a living, multi-dimensional portrait of the megacity in a crucial year of upheaval that evokes all the hope, despair, creativity, horror, escapism, terror, fear, and striving that enveloped the Muscovite cityscape and its inhabitants. Schlögel is an unusually inventive historian and a brilliant stylist; it's a great boon to have his latest work available in English."
Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University and author of Stalin's Genocides
 
"This book's focus is one year, 1937, and one place, Moscow, but it is no narrow history. The narrative has sweep and depth, encompassing the mundane, the spectacular, and the nightmare dream world of Stalin's purges; an incomparable book about people during one of the most grandiose and terrifying epochs of the twentieth century."
David Shearer, University of Delaware
 
"Starting from a birds-eye view of the city from above, a homage to the flight of Bulgakov's Margarita, Schloegel captures the complex specificity of a time and place of immense significance in Soviet and twentieth-century history. In this multivalent historical moment, interrogations at the Lubyanka coexist with happy summer vacations and the triumphant conquest of the North Pole by Soviet aviators. Schloegel brings into play an ingenious variety of sources, ranging from architectural blueprints and city directories to execution records, not forgetting diaries and literary evocations. This is a masterful, panoramic work by a gifted story-teller who is also a highly innovative, sophisticated and erudite historian."
Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago
 
"In brilliant fashion Karl Schlögel presents Moscow as a rotating stage of Soviet desire and Stalinist nightmares. Like no other author before him, he charges his prose and the sequence of scenes with the hallucinatory power of the Communist project. The vertiginous and terrifying effect is his very point and singular achievement."
Jochen Hellbeck, Rutgers University
 
"Karl Schlogel's Moscow 1937 is a brilliant essay of "Total history" on a crucial episode of Soviet history, on one of the greatest historical catastrophes of the Twentieth Century.This is the first book which goes beyond totalitarianism and revisionism and brings us a totally new interpretation of this tragic event by presenting together opposing experiences and manifestations such as the preparation for universal, free, direct and secret elections and carefully planned, organized mass killings. Or, in other words, Dream and Terror."
Nicolas Werth, Institut d'histoire du temps présent
 
"This is a montage of a great city in tumult, in equal parts depicting the optimism of progress and the horror of the show trials, all in the shadow of a looming war."
Andrew Cornish, Readings
"While most historians see both terror and civilisation as important to understanding the Soviet experience of the 1930s, they tend to spend their time investigating either one or the other. Schlögel is the first to attempt to knit them together so intricately. Moscow 1937 is an act of remembrance as well as a work of history."
London Review of Books
"There is no book that so perfectly and completely captures the stark contradictions of Soviet life. Each scene is a marvel, and together they recreate for us a multisided and vanished world."
Wendy Goldman, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Product details

• Authors: Karl Schl&, Karl Schlögel, Karl Schlögel, Karl Schlgel, K Schloegel, Karl Schloegel, Karl (European University of Viadrina) Schloegel, Karl Schlogel, Karl Schlögel
• Assisted by: Rodney Livingstone (Translation)
• Publisher: Polity Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 14.03.2014
• EAN: 9780745650777
• ISBN: 978-0-7456-5077-7
• No. of pages: 650
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; Geschichte, Politikwissenschaft, Russland, Europäische Geschichte, History, Politik und Staat, European History, European Politics, Political Science, Europa /Geschichte, History - General History, HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / European, Zeitgeschichte Europas im 20./21. Jhd., 20th Century & Contemporary European History, Politik / Europa