1937: Stalin's Year of Terror [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Vadim Z. Rogovin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0929087771 | ISBN-13: 978-0929087771 | Publication Date: March 20, 1998 | Edition: illustrated edition

The first major study by a Russian Marxist Historian of the Stalinist purges which are often collectively reffered to by the year they reached their greatest intensity: 1937. Rogovin shows that the purges were aimed at the physical annihilation of the growing socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime. Focused on Leon Trotsky and his thousands of supporters, the purges were a blow against the October Revolution, its leaders and its heritage. This is the fourth volume of Rogovin's seven-volume series, Was There an Alternative?

Editorial Reviews

Review

1937: Stalin's Year of Terror is the first major study by a Russian Marxist historian of the most tragic and fateful year in the history of the Soviet Union. Possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet source material, including archival documents that have only recently been released, Professor Vadim Rogovin presents a detailed and penetrating analysis of the causes, impact and consequences of Stalin's purges. Rogovin demonstrates that the principal function and aim of the terror was the physical annihilation of the substantial socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime. Moreover, Rogovin places at the very center of this historical tragedy the crucial political figure whom most contemporary historians tend, for various ideological reasons, to ignore: Leon Trotsky. Rogovin insists that it is impossible to understand the purges apart from Stalin's determination to stamp out all vestiges of Trotsky's influence which, despite years of repression, had remained a powerful current with considerable support and revolutionary potential within the USSR. Although the first to be translated into the English language, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror is the fourth volume in a projected six-volume history of the political conflicts within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist International between 1922 and 1940. Five volumes of this series have already been published, to steadily growing acclaim, in Russia. The sixth volume will be completed before the end of 1998. All six volumes will be translated into English and published by Mehring Books. --wsws.org

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

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Product Details

• Paperback: 584 pages
• Publisher: Mehring Books, Incorporated; illustrated edition edition (March 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0929087771
• ISBN-13: 978-0929087771
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #428,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The truth about the apocolyptic events in Russia in 1937!, January 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror (Paperback)

The reader travels to a time and place that is as exciting and intense as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Rogovin is our link to a part of Soviet history that was left buried for decades. I was one of about 200 who heard a lecture given by him in Lansing at the University of Michigan in 1995. He presented very complex ideas about the history of his homeland with great care and lucidity. This book provides many more details and far more insights. 1937 describes what happened to Stalin's opponents and why? During his lecture in 1995 the author exhibited an impeccable knowledge of Soviet history and contemporary events which were vaticinal. Particularly, in light of the recent stockmarket crisis in Russia and globally. This book is very graphic and therefore at times difficult to read. One is placed into the courtrooms, jail cells and homes of the persecuted and one listens to conversations as though a participant. Rogovin gives voice to those who were silenced over 60 years ago. He does what other historians fail to achieve. He makes sure we understand why this knowledge is relevent for the 20, 30, 40 or 50 year-old today! I would like to remember him as the Greek writing on the Rosetta Stone that served as modern man's link to Heiroglyphics and Ancient Egypt. His book serves as our link to what many hoped would remain a mystery to the most thoughtful. Details which were obscured in a maze of bureacratic indifference and hypocricy are made clear in "1937: Stalin's year of Terror". He has helped to light our path to the truth-- past and future. I appreciate amazon.com giving me access to historical literature of such high caliber. I look forward to his next translation due out this year.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A suprisingly optimistic work, June 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror (Paperback)

Professor Rogovin's 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror is a surprisingly optimistic work. I say suprising because its subject is the greatest political genocide in history - the intimidation, frame-up and murder of leading Bolsheviks and socialist minded workers and intellectuals. Yet it is an essentially optimistic work because Professor Rogovin is able to lay bare the driving force behind this terror. He shows that it resulted, not from "mans inhumanity to man" or as the "inevitable result of revolution". Rather it was rooted in Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy's attempt to destroy the socialist ideals and principles which had motivated the Russian Revolution. By 1934 Stalin understood that the only way to deal with the rising tide of socialist opposition to the bureaucracy's rule, was to destroy the Bolshevik Party. Starting with the "Trial of the Sixteen", which included Zinoviev and Kamenev, Professor Rogovin dissects the trials. There are new and sickening insights. He describes Stalin's hilarity when a fellow butcher recounts Zinoviev's horror when he realises he has again been betrayed and will be shot. Stalin used the trials to intimidate all those who were hostile to the terrible consequences of the bureaucracy's mismanagement of the economy and the growth of social inequality. At the centre of the opposition to Stalin was Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Professor Rogovin incorporates the exposure of the Moscow Trials frame-up by Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov. This is a welcome addition. The record of the socialist opponents of Stalin's regime have usually been expunged from all accounts of the USSR's history - in order to fit the false schema "Russia equals communism". As Professor Rogovin shows, the finest representatives of the Bolshevik party, were the most intransigent opponents of the Soviet bureaucracy. Above all it is an optimistic work because it shows that the fate of the USSR was not predetermined. The potential contained in such an insight! is enormous.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary and interesting work, October 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror (Paperback)

Professor Rogovin's work on the climax of Stalin's purges in the year 1937 is extraordinarily interesting and useful. He relates the essence of all the new Russian documentation on the period that has appeared since 1991, notably the records of Central Committee plenums, and the translation now brought out by Mehring Books makes this material internationally available. Rogovin's sympathies are distinctly with Trotsky, but this does not impede an objective account where the facts of the terror speak horribly for themselves. These events make it hard to sustain the notion that Stalinism proceeded directly from the earlier phases of the Russian Revolution; it was manifestly a "betrayal," even a counterrevolution (masked by ritualized ideology).THE END