Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR (paperback)

By Vadim Rogovin

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This volume examines the bloodiest period of the Stalinist repression of political opposition in the Soviet Union, debunking the myth that the Great Purges were merely the product of Stalin's paranoia and had no overriding political logic. Through a meticulous examination of original sources, including archival documents only made available for research in the 1990s, Professor Vadim Rogovin argues that the ferocity of the mass repression was directly proportional to the intensity of resistance to Stalin within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), particularly the opposition inspired by and associated with the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky.

"Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR" is the fifth volume of Rogovin's monumental six-volume history of the political conflicts within the CPSU and the Communist International between 1922 and 1940. It is the second volume to be published in English, with a translation by Frederick S. Choate.

Rogovin bases his analysis on scrupulous research, quoting from newly translated or unpublished documents, including memoirs, meeting minutes, newspaper articles and trial transcripts. He documents the reaction of different social layers to the purges, including workers, peasants, non-party intellectuals and the CPSU rank-and-file. This book includes rarely published photographs of the prison camps, documenting the lives of those labeled by Stalin "enemies of the people."

The volume analyzes such critical events as the Bukharin-Rykov trial, last of the infamous show trials; the massacre of Trotskyists in the Vorkuta slave-labor camp; and the assassination by Stalinist agents of Leon Sedov, Trotsky's son, and other oppositionists outside the Soviet Union. It concludes with an examination of how the purges transformed the CPSU and Soviet society as a whole.

Book Review: Defending historical truth Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR

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Author	Vadim Rogovin
Publisher	Mehring Books
Publication Date	2009
Pages	513
Publication Type	Paperback
ISBN	978-1-893638-04-4

Chapter	Page
Foreword	*vii*
Note from the Translator	xi
Introduction	1
1. “Mass Operations”	7
2. The January Plenum of the Central Committee: “On the Errors of Party Organizations”	15
3. The January Plenum of the Central Committee: The Postyshev Affair	21
4. Preparation for the Third Show Trial	27
5. The Episode with Krestinsky	39
6. Bukharin and Vyshinsky	43
7. The “Conspiracy” of 1918	49
8. The Mystery of Bukharin	55
9. Yagoda’s Orbit	61
10. Poisonings and Poisoners	67
11. What Was True at the Trial?	73
12. The Main Defendant	79
13. The Trial’s Domestic Political Goals	83
14. Foreign Policy Goals of the Moscow Trials	87
15. The General Prosecutor	93
16. The Sentence	99
17. International Response to the Trial	*103*
18. Trotsky on the Moscow Trials	*111*
19. The Historical Fate of the Moscow Trials	*119*
20. Stalin and His Intimate Circle	*129*
1	*134*
2	*142*
3	*149*
4	*152*
5	*154*
6	*156*
7	*157*
8	*158*
9	*161*
10	*163*
11	*164*
12	*166*
21. In the Bowels of the Politburo	*169*
22. Liquidation of the Central Committee	*173*
23. The Party Apparatus	*185*
24. The Army	*195*
25. The NKVD	*205*
26. The Komsomol	*213*
27. The Non-Party Intelligentsia	*219*
28. The People	*229*
29. The Great Purge as Seen by Enemies of Soviet Power	*237*
30. The Great Purge as Seen by Russian Émigrés	*241*
31. The Great Purge as Seen by Communists	*247*
32. Was Anyone Guilty?	*265*
33. Oppositionists in the Camps	*275*
34. The Tragedy at Vorkuta	*281*
35. Who Benefited from the Great Purge?	*287*
36. The New Recruits of 1937	*291*
37. Who Was Punished, and in What Way, After Stalin’s Death?	*297*
38. Terror against Foreign Communists	*303*
39. Non-Returners of 1937	*321*
1	*321*
2	*326*
3	*328*
40. Non-Returners of 1938	*333*
1	*333*
2	*336*
41. The Verdict of the Dewey Commission	*341*
42. Bolshevism, Stalinism, Trotskyism	*347*
43. “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt”	*357*
44. “Their Morals and Ours”	*365*
45. “The Old Man Would Find It Hard Without Sonny”	*381*
46. An Agent Known as “Tulip”	*385*
47. The Death of Leon Sedov	*391*
48. Trotsky in Mexico	*397*
49. Murders Abroad	*403*
50. Paris Intrigues	*407*
51. The End of the “Yezhov Period”	*413*
52. The Falsification of History	*421*
Appendix I	*429*
Appendix II	*441*
Glossary	*451*
Dates of Party Congresses, Comintern Congresses and Trials	*455*
Endnotes	*457*
Index	*493*

Vadim Rogovin (1937-1998) was a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow from the late 1970s until his death. Prior to this he had worked in the field of literary and aesthetic criticism. As a researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Rogovin studied and wrote about the existence and growth of social inequality in the USSR and its implications for social justice, labor productivity, and social morality in Soviet society. Rogovin’s interest in analyzing the allocation of wealth and privileges in the Soviet Union grew out of political conclusions he drew about the origins of the Soviet bureaucracy. After having quietly gained access to some of the writings of the Left Opposition during the 1960s and 1970s, Rogovin, whose own grandfather had died in the purges, became convinced of the correctness of Leon Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin. In the late 1980s, he became an outspoken critic of Mikhail Gorbachev’s pro-market economic reforms and their negative impact on the living standards of the broad mass of the population. After writing articles in the popular Soviet press about the positions of the Left Opposition on major questions of politics and policy, Rogovin started publishing what would become a seven-volume series on the rise of Stalinism and the history of the socialist-based opposition to Stalin’s rule. Before his untimely death due to cancer in 1998, he delivered lectures on this theme to audiences in Europe, the United States, Australia, and Latin America. Additional biographical information about Rogovin and commentary about his contributions can be found here, in a tribute given to him on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday by David North, the Chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site.

You may also be interested in the following work(s) by this author:

Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR (cloth bound) $49.95	Two Lectures: Stalin's Great Terror and Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Marxism in the USSR $9.95

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