Moscow, 1937

Home > Other > Moscow, 1937 > Page 79
Moscow, 1937 Page 79

by Karl Schlogel


  2 Oksana Bulgakowa, ‘Sergej Eisensteins Moskau-Film Lauf der Zeit’, unpublished lecture.

  3 Emma Widdis, Aleksandr Medvedkin (London, 2004).

  4 Urussowa, Das neue Moskau, p. 344.

  5 Widdis, Visions of a New Land, p. 178 [also Widdis, Aleksandr Medvedkin, p. 99].

  6 Ibid., p. 179.

  7 Iosif Romanovskii, Novaia Moskva: ploshchadi i magistrali (Moscow, 1938); Lev Nikulin, Vot Moskva! Dve povesti (Moscow, 1937); I. A. Grankina, V. P. Pronina and T. A. Selivanova (eds), Moskva sotsialisticheskaia (Moscow, 1940); Vladimir E. Poletaev, Na putiakh k novoi Moskve: nachalo rekonstruktsii stolitsy (1937–1935) (Moscow, 1961); Pavel Lopatin, Metro (Moscow, 1937); Pavel Lopatin, Moskva: ocherk iz istorii velikogo goroda (Moscow, 1939); Pavel Lopatin, Volga idet v Moskvu (Moscow, 1938).

  8 Cited in Irina Belobrovtseva and Svetlana Kulyus, Roman Mikhaila Bulgakova, ‘Master i Margarita’: opyt kommentarii (Tallinn, 2004), p. 82.

  9 Generalnyi plan: postanovlenie SSK SSSR i CK WKP(B), 10 July 1935. For the history of the reconstruction, see, especially, Istoriia Moskvy, Vol. 6: Period postroenia sotsializma (1917g.–iiun' 1941g.), Book 2 (Moscow, 1959); Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge, 2002).

  10 Moskva rekonstruiruetsia: al'bom diagram, toposkhem i fotografii po rekonstruktsii goroda Moskvy, ed. Institut izobrazitel'noi statistiki sovetskogo stroitel'stva i khoziaistva TSUNKHU Gosplana SSSR (Moscow, 1938).

  11 M. Gor'kii, L. L. Averbakh and S. G. Firin (eds), Belomorsko–Baltiisky kanal imeni Stalina: istoriia stroitel'stva (Moscow, 1934).

  12 Moskva rekonstruiruyetsia, preface.

  13 On the post-revolutionary Russian imperium as a country of refugees and nomads, see Jörg Baberowski, Der rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich, 2003); cf. also Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (London and New York, 2005), pp. 52–65.

  14 On urban development, see Harald Bodenschatz and Christiane Post (eds), Städtebau im Schatten Stalins: Die internationale Suche nach der sozialistischen Stadt in der Sowjetunion 1919–1935 (Berlin, 2003); Ivan Sabelin, Istoriya goroda Moskvy (Moscow, 1990).

  15 Quoted from Generalnyi plan, pp. 1–20, here p. 1.

  16 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

  17 Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995), p. 254.

  18 Generalnyi plan, p. 46.

  19 Grankina et al. (eds), Moskva sotsialisticheskaia, p. 22.

  20 Colton, Moscow, p. 340; information derived from the Generalnyi plan.

  21 Dietmar Neutatz, Die Moskauer Metro: Von den ersten Plänen bis zur Großbaustelle des Stalinismus (1897–1935) (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2001).

  22 Cf. the account in Bukharin’s novel Vremena [ How it all Began] in the section ‘A Moscow childhood in 1900’, p. 000 in the present volume; Sabelin, Istoriia goroda Moskvy.

  23 Colton, Moscow, p. 269; see also chapter 38, ‘The Foundation Pit’, in the present volume.

  24 Iurii Fedosiuk, Utro krasit nezhnym tsvetom: vospominaniia o Moskve 1920– 1930-kh godov (Moscow, 2003); Iurii Fedosiuk, Moskva v koltse Sadovykh: putevoditel' (Moscow, 1983).

  25 Colton, Moscow, pp. 264 and 230.

  26 Ibid., pp. 267–8.

  27 Pravda, 22 July 1937.

  28 Colton, Moscow, p. 267.

  29 Ruth von Mayenburg, Hotel Lux (Frankfurt am Main, 1978), p. 153.

  30 David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929– 1941 (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994), p. 139.

  31 Julia Obertreis, Tränen des Sozialismus (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2004); Natalia B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn' sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii 1920–1930 gody (St Petersburg, 1999).

  32 Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis, p. 131.

  33 Ibid., pp. 135–6.

  34 Ibid., p. 70.

  35 On the subject of the passport laws, see Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society: Controlling Movement in Russia and the USSR (San Francisco and Oxford, 1993); Nobuo Shimotomai, Moscow under Stalinist Rule 1931–34 (New York, 1991).

  36 Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis, pp. 1–2.

  37 Ibid., p. 7.

  38 Gabriele Freitag, Nächstes Jahr in Moskau! Die Zuwanderung von Juden in die sowjetische Metropole 1917–1932 (Göttingen, 2004).

  39 Irina N. Gavrilova, Naselenie Moskvii: istoricheskii rakurs (Moscow, 2001), p. 121.

  40 Jörg Baberowski and Anselm-Doering Manteuffel, Ordnung durch Terror: Gewaltexzesse und Vernichtung im nationalsozialistischen und im stalinistischen Imperium (Bonn, 2006).

  41 Ivan Petrovich Gomozenkov, quoted in Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis, p. 70.

  Chapter 3 A Topography of the Disappeared

  1 Vsia Moskva: adresno-spravochnaia kniga na 1936g (Moscow, 1936).

  2 Karl Schlögel, ‘Vsya Moskva’, in Schlögel, Moskau lesen (Berlin, 1984), pp. 101–13. A more systematic view of this genre is to be found in Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich, 2003), pp. 329–46.

  3 J. Arch Getty, ‘Soviet city directories’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola (eds), A Researcher’s Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s (Armonk, NY, and London, 1990), pp. 202–14.

  4 Vsia Moskva, pp. 603–5.

  5 The absence of Russian Party and state organizations in Soviet Moscow is a central theme of Geoffrey Hosking’s study Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

  6 Vsia Moskva, p. 1.

  7 Iurii Trifonov, The House on the Embankment, trans. Michael Glenny (London, 1985); Mikhail Korsunov and Viktoria Terekhova, Taina tain moskovskikh (Moscow, 1995); and, especially, Wladislaw Hedeler, ‘Die Präsenz staatlicher Gewalt inmitten einer urbanen Umwelt: Das Beispiel Moskau’, lecture given in the History Seminar in Munich, July 2006.

  8 Ibid., p. 1.

  9 Ibid., p. 73.

  10 Ibid., p. 75.

  11 Ibid., p. 73.

  12 Ibid., pp. 77–8.

  13 The People’s Commissariats are treated in order in Vsya Moskva, pp. 8–10.

  14 See chapter 33, ‘The Butovo Shooting Range’, in the present volume.

  15 Juri Trifonov, Das Verschwinden (Berlin, 1989), p. 5.

  16 Vsya Moskva, p. 4; all the information given here is based on Wladislaw Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938: Planung, Inszenierung und Wirkung (Berlin, 2003).

  17 Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge (London, 1972), p. 225.

  18 Vsya Moskva, pp. 92, 325.

  19 Ibid., p. 94.

  20 Ibid., p. 93.

  21 Ibid., p. 95.

  22 Ibid., p. 97.

  23 Ibid., p. 328.

  24 Ibid., p. 329.

  25 Ibid., p. 379.

  26 Ibid., p. 453.

  27 Ibid., p. 15.

  28 Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 192.

  29 Ibid., p. 203.

  30 Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 288–9.

  31 Ibid., pp. 286–7.

  32 Aleksandr Fatlin, ‘Terror raionnogo masshtaba: Kuntsevo’, in Butovskii poligon, 1937–1938gg: kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh represii, no. 5 (Moscow, 2001), pp. 13–21; Alexander Vatlin, Tatort Kunzewo: Opfer und Täter des Stalinschen Terrors 1937/38 (Berlin, 2003).

  33 ‘Iz pokazanii svidetelia Tikhacheva’, in Butovskii poligon, 1937–1938gg: kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii, no. 3 (Moscow, 1999), pp. 352–4.

  34 William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and Stalinist Repression 1934–1939 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001), pp. 163–74.

  35 Compiled from ‘Arestovany v Moskve’, in Butovskii poligon, 1937–1938gg: kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii, no. 7 (Moscow, 2003), pp. 318–19.

  36 Ibid., p. 318.

  37 See the detailed study of the ‘House on the Moskva’ by Hedeler, ‘Die Präsenz staatlicher Gewalt inmitten einer urbanen Umwelt’.

  38 ‘Arestovany v Moskve�
�, pp. 318–19.

  39 See chapter 37, ‘For Official Use Only’, in this volume.

  Chapter 4 The Creation of Enemies

  1 Prozessbericht über die Strafsache des trotzkistisch-sinowjewistischen terroristischen Zentrums, verhandelt vor dem Militärkollegium des Obersten Gerichtshofes der UdSSR, 19–24 August 1936, ed. the People’s Commissariat for Justice of the USSR (Moscow, 1936), p. 119. Unlike the two following show trials, all that survives of this one is a ‘report’, not a verbatim ‘record’.

  2 Ibid., p. 167.

  3 Ibid.

  4 André Gide, Afterthoughts: A Sequel to Back from the USSR, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London, n.d.).

  5 This trial, like the following ones, has been described and analysed in detail. See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London, 1973); Nicolas Werth, Le Procès de Moscou 1936–1938 (Brussels, 1987); William J. Chase, ‘Stalin as producer: the Moscow show trials and the construction of mortal threats’, in Sarah Davies and James Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge, 2005).

  6 On the preparations for the trials between 1936 and 1938, see Wladislaw Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938: Planung, Inszenierung und Wirkung (Berlin, 2003); Oleg W. Chlewnjuk, Das Politbüro: Mechanismen der politischen Macht in der Sovjetunion der dreißiger Jahre (Hamburg, 1998).

  7 Lars T. Lih, Oleg Naumow and Oleg W. Chlewnjuk (eds), Stalin: Briefe an Molotow 1925–1936 (Berlin, 1996).

  8 For Vyshinskii’s biography, see Arkadij I. Vaksberg, Gnadenlos: Andrei Wyschinski – Mörder im Dienst Stalins (Bergisch-Gladbach, 1991). On the earlier trials, see Jörg Baberowski, Der Rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich, 2003).

  9 J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov (eds), The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932–1939 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1999).

  10 Prozessbericht …1936, p. 47.

  11 Ibid., p. 64.

  12 Ibid., pp. 87–9.

  13 Ibid., p. 103.

  14 Ibid., p. 100.

  15 Ibid., p. 96.

  16 Ibid., pp. 59, 64.

  17 Ibid., p.104.

  18 Ibid., p. 103.

  19 Ibid., p. 67.

  20 Ibid., p. 134.

  21 Ibid., p. 127.

  22 Oleg W. Chlewnjuk, Das Politbüro (Hamburg, 1998), p. 91.

  23 Wadim Rogowin, Vor dem großen Terror: Stalins Neo-NÖP (Essen, 2000).

  24 Chlewnjuk, Das Politbüro, p. 53.

  25 For this interpretation, see also Gábor Tamás Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933–1953 (Chur and New York, 1991), as well as Rittersporn, ‘The omnipresent conspiracy: on Soviet imagery of politics and social relations in the 1930s’, in Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn (eds), Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath: Essays in Honour of Moshe Lewin (Armonk, NY, and Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 101–20.

  26 Lorenz Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (1917–1953) (Munich, 2008); Solomon too notes the conservative turn of the law – see Peter H. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, 1996).

  27 The most important study of identity ascription, masking and unmasking comes from Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2005).

  28 On the ritual of purging the party, see Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis, and also Nathan Leites and Elsa Bernaut, Ritual of Liquidation: The Case of the Moscow Trials (Glencoe, IL, 1954).

  29 Prozessbericht …1936, p. 35.

  30 Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis, p. 371. On the history of the show trial, see Elizabeth A. Wood, Performing Justice: Agitating Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2005).

  31 Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis, pp. 146–7.

  32 Ibid., p. 381.

  33 Ibid., p. 388.

  34 Prozessbericht …1936, p. 35.

  35 Ibid., p. 132.

  36 Ibid., p. 173.

  37 Ibid., p. 124.

  38 Ibid., p. 170.

  39 Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis, p. 82.

  40 Prozessbericht …1936, p. 124.

  41 Leites and Bernaut, Ritual of Liquidation.

  42 Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis, p. 396.

  Chapter 5 ‘Tired of the Effort of Observing and Understanding’

  1 On the travels of Western intellectuals to the Soviet Union, see Robert Conquest, ‘The great error: Soviet myths and Western minds’, in Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York, 2001), pp. 115–49; David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual friends of Communism (New Haven, CT, 1988); Sophie Coeuré, La Grande Lueur à l’Est: Les Français et l’Union Soviétique 1917–1939 (Paris, 1999); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba 1928–1978 (New York and Oxford, 1981); Sylvia R. Margulies, The Pilgrimage to Russia: The Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924–1937 (Madison, 1968); Rachel Mazuy, Croire plutôt que voir? Voyages en Russie Soviétique (1919–1939) (Paris, 2002); Gerd Koenen, Die großen Gesänge: Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung: Führerkulte und Heldenmythen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1991).

  2 André Gide, Afterthoughts: A Sequel to Back from the USSR, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London, n.d.).

  3 Jelena Bulgakowa, Margarita und der Meister: Tagebücher, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1993), p. 229.

  4 Lion Feuchtwanger–Arnold Zweig: Briefwechsel, 1933–1958, ed. Harold von Hofe, vol. 1 (Berlin and Weimar, 1984), p. 122.

  5 Lion Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937: My Visit Described for my Friends, trans. Irene Josephy (London, 1937), pp. 9–10.

  6 Ibid., p. 9.

  7 Ibid., p. 11.

  8 Ibid., p. 12.

  9 Wladislaw Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938: Planung, Inszenierung und Wirkung (Berlin, 2003), p. 135.

  10 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, p. 125.

  11 Ibid., pp. 127–8.

  12 Georgi Dimitroff, Tagebücher 1933–1943, ed. Bernhard H. Bayerlein, trans. Wladislaw Hedeler and Birgit Schliewenz (Berlin, 2000), vol. 1, p. 140.

  13 Ibid., p. 148.

  14 Volker Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger (Berlin, 1984), p. 179.

  15 Pravda and Deutsche Zentral Zeitung, 6 February 1937.

  16 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, p. 13.

  17 Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger, p. 180; David Pike, Deutsche Schriftsteller im sowjetischen Exil, 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), pp. 229–30.

  18 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, p. 134.

  19 Lion Feuchtwanger, Exil: Roman (Amsterdam, 1940), pp. 875–6.

  20 An indispensable aid to travel at that time: Guide to the City of Moscow: Handbook for Tourists, with Information on the City’s Past, Present & Future, Descriptions of its Museums and Points of Interest, including 6 Maps (Moscow, 1937). There is a parallel piece of reportage from a fellow traveller: Ludwig Marcuse, Mein 20. Jahrhundert: Auf dem Weg zu einer Autobiographie (Munich, 1960).

  21 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, p. 66.

  22 Michael David-Fox, ‘The “heroic life” of a friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet culture’, Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures & Societies 18 (August 2006), pp. 8–114; Matthias Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Rußland, 1921–1941, mit einem bio-bibliographischen Anhang zu 96 deutschen Reiseautoren (Münster, 1999).

  23 D. Karavkina’s reports are printed in Feuchtwanger’s Moskau 1937: Ein Reisebericht für meine Freunde (2nd edn, Berlin, 1993), pp. 143–8.

  24 On Germans in exile in Moscow, see Carola Tischler, Flucht in die Verfolgung: Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil – 1933 bis 1945 (Münster, 1996); Reinhard Müller, Die Akte Wehner: Moskau 1937 bis 1941 (Berlin, 1993); Reinhard Müller, Herbert Wehner – Moskau 1937 (Hamburg, 2004); Reinhard Müller, Menschenfalle Moskau: Exil und s
talinistische Verfolgung (Hamburg, 2001); Reinhard Müller (ed.), Die Säuberung: Moskau 1936: Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1991).

  25 The last meeting between Gide and Bukharin took place on 18 June 1936; cf. Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse, p. 53.

  26 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, pp. 20, 29–31.

  27 Ibid., p. 72.

  28 Ibid., p. 33.

  29 Ibid., pp. 52–3.

  30 Ibid., p. 101.

  31 Ibid., p. 135.

  32 Ibid., pp. 152–3.

  33 See the reports in Pravda, 3 February 1937.

  34 All this information is to be found in Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse.

  Chapter 6 In the Glare of Battle

 

‹ Prev