Moscow, 1937

Thank god that's finished. A massive tome detailing, blow by blow, a single year during The Great Terror. On one hand, Soviet society is portrayed as its creators would have wished - a worker's paradise. On the other, one execution after another and for what? To feed the self-fuelled paranoia, schizophrenia of Uncle Joseph. That reflects in Soviet society where a printed list of directors of any given company in all probability wouldn't be the same by the time the list had gone to press. When you consider this, the veneer of achievement is truly very thin. That;'s not to say the Soviets accomplished nothing but had they had what we might call a "normal" society, their achievements might have reflected in another light.All that said, it's heavy weather and you get bogged down in the minutiae of this man's fate or that. It could have done with some trimming, for sure, but nevertheless, it's an eye-popping account of just one year.Thank god I only had to read about it.

German historian Karl Schlogel has given us an encyclopedic history of Moscow in the pivotal year of 1937. Unfortunately for the lay reader this 650 page book in the print edition is long march into way too much detail. That said if you get through it, the reader will learn much about Stalin’s Russia.He presents history starting from the “1936 Directory of all Moscow;” a tourist guide of sorts to the city. Many of its authors would be dead by 1938. On the surface all is well with Moscow being a construction zone for above ground and below ground projects. International conventions of architects and geologists are taking place and there is a great fascination with aviation. I learned that Russian pilots flew over the pole to the United States, a heroic feat. As a result Russian advances in postwar aviation should not have come as a surprise to the West.However beneath the surface there is terror. Much of the public works are constructed with prison labor. Stalin is staging a coup against the party by rounding up the old Bolsheviks and placing them in the dock at show trials presided over dramatically by Andrei Vishinskii, later the Soviet’s U.N. ambassador. Under the auspices of the NKVD 350,000 people are killed in 1937 and nearly that much in 1938 with mass graves just outside of Moscow. Along the way two NKVD directors Iogoda and Yezhov are killed until Beria consolidates his power that will last through 1953.Everywhere the cry is to smash the Troskyite-Zinovievite plot against the Soviet state. The wily Stalin plays the fears about Germany and Japan to attack his domestic enemies. Tellingly most of the Comintern is liquidated during 1936-38, well before its official demise in 1943. We also see a very naïve U.S. ambassador Joseph Davies accepting the Stalin line on the purge trails. Too bad William Bullitt, his predecessor wasn’t there at the time.The book ends with the Nikolai Bukharin show trial. Surprisingly Bukharin asks Stalin to send him to the U.S. to highlight the dangers of Trotskyism. He is shot instead. Schlogel tells a horror story and it ends with Stalin in full power in 1939 with a host of new apparatchiks totally beholden to him.• With apologies to Arthur Koestler.

This book is a fascinating concept imperfectly pulled off (with occasional bursts of brilliant story telling) about the wondrous, deadly fantasy world conjured by the Russian communists. Its focus is the year 1937 as the people of Moscow lived it -- the mass manias, joys, hopes, manic construction and destruction of buildings, endless parades, show trials and, of course, the slaughter. The communist regime displayed the greatest energy within Moscow, and all trembled under an iron-fisted autocrat (Stalin) who put Ivan the Terrible to shame.Moscow 1937 is akin to a "yearbook" that attempts to capture the whole experience of a specific time for a specific place. While deeply researched and sporting some chapters that stand out (such as on the killing fields of Botovo and the impact of radio), long sections of the book can be a slog. The first principle of story-telling is exclusion -- one need not tell everything, yet Mr. Schlogel certainly tries. More can be less, at times.In the end, Mr. Schlogel is to be commended for keeping in active memory what it was like to live in Moscow during the time Stalin’s power reached a fever pitch, when a small group of politicians had such power over a society they could play god upon it. This is not a happy story.It is fitting that the massive Palace of Soviets graces the cover of this important but flawed book -- it was never built, yet what had stood upon the ground where it was to go (the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour) was destroyed to make way for a mad vision. And that is why this book is so important despite all its flaws -- it is a study of "the long-term consequences of this bacchanal of self-destruction."

I had never heard of Karl Schlögel before but the theme of this work greatly intrigued me which is why I purchased it. Its not a traditional work of history though. This is a textured and layered discussion. Moscow 1937 focuses like a pitbull on a moment of time during the twentieth century. What Schlögel provides here is a panoramic view of the Soviet Union, and what went on in Moscow in particular, in 1937. The author has separate chapters on art, architecture, music, literature, topography, parades, fitness, etc. His narrative is not confined to merely the purges and the show trials which is what we normally think of regarding that year. It is, rather, a 360 degree snapshot of the Soviet culture. The photographic plates and artwork are absolutely amazing. They are seriously first class and open up a world that long time students of the USSR were previously unfamiliar with. Most of what he includes in black and white page reproductions I've never seen before. Its a rich history indeed. The only negative about the book is that--unlike a Beevor, a Conquest or a Service-- Schlögel's narrative is dry and doesn't flow. Some of this could be a language issue, but, regardless, Moscow 1937 is well worth the price. It's an educational tour de force.

This work can be more than a little frustrating, it takes a literary approach to its subject rather than what would expect from a history book and so at times the author overdoes it on emphasis and rather likes to club you to death with some of his core arguments. And the translation and editing can be hard to take in places - dates are regularly and obviously wrong (to the extent of being a century out) while Russian names can be transliterated in two different ways only a few sentences apart.Further, you struggle towards the author's explanation for why 1937 was such a year of madness and cruelty: you get there in the end (sort of) but it takes a long meander.Having said all that, it really is a very good book, hugely adding to understanding of the criminal and crazed leadership of the Bolsheviks, the mass revolutionary hysteria of the society they were building and how their deep and permanent panic eventually pushed them into unleashing a bloodbath that consumed so many of that leadership itself even while visiting an even greater slaughter on so many ordinary people deemed through caprice to be enemies.Incidentally, there was no issue with the printing in my copy.

This is fantastic. Translated from the German, the prose can be a bit clunky, but I really enjoyed the episodic way it described the Moscow of 1937 and the gangster regime that controlled Russia and the other peoples imprisoned in that Gulag of nations. There are sections on the use of culture to shore up the regime - eg Pushkin, sections on the building of Moscow, on the shooting range, on the census, the workforce in the Stalin Car Factories, architecture and destruction, in a multidimensional physically situated book. There is a map of Moscow, so the physical reality of the locus of Soviet power and its actions seems more concrete and horrible.Fully deserving of the awards and accolades. I was reading it when on a business trip to Luxembourg. I discovered that one night it was 2am and I was still engrossed, that's how good it is.

This book was not at all what I expected from the blurb on the website, but it was much better and exactly what I needed. It addresses very much the reality of Moscow 1937 rather than some kind of political-theory spin. And while it revolves around the trial, all the rest is really so much more informative about life and development in the post-tsarist empire. Absolutely fascinating.

A total history which captures the complexities and arbitrariness of the Terror, Schlögel's Moscow, 1937 is a redoubtable work of scholarship. Few books succeed in capturing the atomsphere of Stalinism characterised by anonymous forces upending people's lives and the blunt application of power in such a comprehensive fashion. The sheer breadth and depth of sources Schlögel consults is particularly striking and his first chapter which alludes to and borrows from Margarita's iconic flight over Moscow in Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus, The Master and Margarita, is simply ingenious. At times, the translated prose can be clunky and this is by no means a work for Soviet history neophytes. Schlögel's arguments require a fair bit of existing knowledge to follow at times, but, as someone who has studied Russian and Soviet history at a tertiary level, I believe this is among the most impressive works of scholarship on the Stalinist period of the 21st century.

I kept waiting for more indebt revelations as to the mindset of Stalin and more personal experiences. But, it gave me enough knowledge to argue points against Putin's regime.