Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR - Softcover

Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1893638049 ISBN 13: 9781893638044

Publisher: Mehring Books, Incorporated, 2009

Synopsis

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. Far from Trotsky being a politically isolated figure, as both Stalinist and anti-communist historians have claimed, there was substantial sympathy for his criticism of the Stalin regime in the ranks and even in the leadership of the CPSU, and support for his demands for inner-party democracy, greater social equality and an international orientation to the Bolshevik goal of world revolution. It was this political fact, as Rogovin demonstrates, that accounts for the purge reaching so deeply into the party apparatus, the military, the Komsomol youth movement, and the broader layers of the population. Rogovin bases his analysis on scrupulous research, quoting from newly translated or unpublished documents, including memoirs, meeting minutes, newspaper articles and trial transcripts.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. Chronologically, this volume takes up where its predecessor, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror , left off, with the June 1937 plenum of the Central Committee that followed the purging of the Soviet military command and the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading generals. It 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin (1937-1998) was a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences and leading researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He is the author of 250 scholarly works, including eight monographs on problems of social policy, the history of social thought and the history of political movements in the former USSR. Before his untimely death in September 1998, Dr. Rogovin presented lectures all over the world about the socialist-based opposition to the Stalinist regime.

Review:

The publication of the English-language edition of Stalin s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR by the late Marxist historian and sociologist Vadim Rogovin is a major contribution to the study of the purges that wiped out the entire generation of Bolshevik leaders and socialist workers and intellectuals who led the October 1917 Revolution and created the Soviet Union. The appearance of this work in English is all the more important given the extent to which contemporary American and British historians have ignored the political motivations and objectives which determined Stalin s actions between 1936 and 1939. Rogovin presents a compelling and uncompromisingly political interpretation of the Terror. Stalin s aim, the author insists, was to eliminate all traces of the substantial Marxist-inspired socialist opposition to his bureaucratic regime. Moreover, Stalin s fixation on Trotsky was not, Rogovin maintains, an incidental phenomenon that served little more than propaganda purposes. Rather, Stalin perceived the exiled Trotsky as the most significant threat to his dictatorship. He was the personification of a revolutionary program and tradition that the bureaucratic regime was determined to extirpate. The living Trotsky, his active supporters around the world, and, however silent and repressed, his countless sympathizers within the Soviet Union constituted an opposition that Stalin found impossible to ignore. As Rogovin demonstrates, Stalin carried out the physical destruction of not only the Bolshevik Party, but all those layers of Soviet society that had any attachment to the socialist traditions of the Russian Revolution. Stalin s Terror of 1937-38: Political Genocide in the USSR is the fifth volume in a seven-volume cycle that Vadim Rogovin wrote between 1990 and his death in 1998 at the age of 61. Rogovin s study of the Marxist opposition to the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution and its tragic fate is the extraordinary achievement of a man who may rightfully be judged the greatest Soviet historian of the post-Stalin era. Rogovin s place in Soviet historiography is all the more remarkable given the fact that his work as a historian began only during the last decade of his life. A doctor of philosophical sciences, from the late 1970s until his death in 1998 Rogovin held a position at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where he was a prolific researcher and writer. His work at the institute focused on what was known in Soviet parlance as the distribution problem i.e., social inequality and its implications for social justice, labor productivity, and social morality in Soviet society. Having worked earlier in the field of aesthetics and literary criticism, Rogovin turned to sociology to investigate, to the extent possible under conditions of police surveillance and censorship, the allocation of wealth and privileges in the Soviet Union. This interest grew out of political conclusions he drew in the aftermath of Nikita Khrushchev s 1956 exposure of Stalin s crimes at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Khrushchev s speech marked the beginning of a short-lived thaw that inspired an awakening for countless intellectuals and artists of Rogovin s generation. Rogovin, whose grandfather was a victim of the purges, had never believed the official Soviet version of history that portrayed virtually all of Lenin s comrades in the leadership of the October Revolution, with the exception of Stalin, as traitors... To read the rest of this review visit wsws.org --wsws.org

About this edition

• Publisher: Mehring Books, Incorporated
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1893638049
• ISBN 13: 9781893638044
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 513