[Marxism] Moscow 1937
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (Posted to FB by Jairus Banaji) Karl Schlögel (b. 1948), the German historian whose amazing book ‘Moscow, 1937’ (the 2008 German title translates as ‘Terror and Dream’) is a brilliantly original if searing account of Stalin’s terror as it unfolded in Moscow and its surroundings in 1937. It is unbelievable that there are still sectors of the Left (in countries like India, no less) willing to defend Stalin and his regime as if this was a revolutionary or left-wing thing to do!! At a memorial meeting for Tony Cliff in London in May 2000, I recall seeing at one of the stalls there a (North Korean? Chinese?) biography of Stalin which (and this is what caught my attention) had a long preface by Sitaram Yechury eulogizing Stalin to the skies. I haven’t been able to trace this publication but it exists. Even today the CPI(M) remains a largely unreformed Stalinist party. About the mass executions at the Butovo shooting range on the outskirts of Moscow, Schlögel writes, “The overwhelming majority of the victims were workers who had until recently been peasants”. The majority of them “had no political affiliation, and only one half had higher education”. They were shortlisted not on the basis of concrete evidence of anything but of what the administration called ‘perpetrator profiles’! Here, if you can stomach it, is an extract from a section of the chapter on Butovo; the section heading is ‘Sociology of a mass grave’: The graves of Butovo contain the bodies of a cross-section of the Soviet population. Of those who were shot, most – 11,300 – came from Moscow and the Moscow region. Even so, the dead came from all over the Soviet Union: 2,652 victims came from every region of the USSR – European Russia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East; 331 came from Ukraine, 98 from Belorussia, 150 from the Baltic regions, Moldavia, the Caucasus republics, Central Asia and Kazakhstan. Over 100 victims came from the prisons and corrective labour camps. In around 300 cases there is no information at all. Because their files were not accessible, it has not been possible to give a breakdown of the figures in the huge number of cases of the 5,658 victims who were condemned as ‘criminals’. It is an international mass grave. The corpses buried here include victims from Germany, Poland, France, the United States, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Japan, India, China and many other countries, as well as many refugees and stateless persons. Around 70 per cent of those buried here are Russians. There is a disproportionate number of Latvians, Poles and Jews, followed by Ukrainians, Germans and Belorussians. Overall, the graves contain members of over sixty nationalities. Their arrests and murders were carried out at an astonishing pace. The cases that were processed fastest were those of ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’; the most difficult ones were those involving ‘spying’ or ‘terrorist activity’. The overwhelming majority of those shot – 80 to 85 per cent – had no political affiliation, and only one half had higher education. In a word, the victims were predominantly people who had no connection with politics or the nomenklatura. All age groups were represented among the dead. Those executed range from fifteen- to sixteen-year-old youths to old men of eighty. The inhabitants of entire settlements were dispatched to the mass graves of Butovo. On occasion, ten or thirty people from a single village or settlement would be killed in Butovo at one time…Married couples were shot – there are over forty couples buried here, parents with grown-up children, brothers and sisters – sometimes as many as five, six or eight members of the same family. Family members living in different towns and regions were brought to Moscow and then shot there. Death in Butovo had a masculine face: 19,093 men were shot and 858 women. Every class and stratum was represented in the mass graves. The overwhelming majority of the victims were workers who had until recently been peasants. Next came white-collar workers in Soviet institutions, and then peasants proper. Peasants who could neither read nor write and who put a cross under the record of their interrogation instead of a signature were accused of ‘Trotskyism’ or ‘counter-revolutionary activities’ – words that simply did not feature in their vocabulary. Many of them died without ever having understood of what crimes they had been suspected and accused. Peasant families were accused collectively of spying. The peasants included the navvies (grabari) who were joined together in cooperative arteli and who
[Marxism] Moscow 1937
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == LRB Vol. 36 No. 14 · 17 July 2014r The Dzhaz Age Stephen Lovell Moscow 1937 by Karl Schlögel, translated by Rodney Livingstone Polity, 650 pp, £16.99, March, ISBN 978 0 7456 5077 7 Over the last thirty years, Karl Schlögel has been the most distinguished flâneur among historians of Russia. A sense of place – both as the setting for human encounters and something that conditions cultural and intellectual life – has informed much of his work. In 1984 he published Moskau lesen, an essayistic exploration of the Soviet capital, while his later books include a history of St Petersburg in the early 20th century which sees the city as a ‘laboratory of modernity’, and a study of Russian-German interactions through the prism of Berlin, which Schlögel christens ‘Europe’s Ostbahnhof’. In this latest book, however, the flâneur has to change his mode of transport. To represent Moscow in 1937, the leisurely intellectual stroll is traded for a bumpy ride on a witch’s broomstick. Moscow 1937 opens with the heroine’s flight in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which, for all its phantasmagoric trappings, provides an ethnographically grounded depiction of the city in the 1930s. Schlögel’s book, like Bulgakov’s, has stomach-churning narrative lurches. Bulgakov gives us a variety show that turns into a public execution; Schlögel has the NKVD co-ordinators of mass murder holding a public celebration in the Bolshoi Theatre to mark the twentieth anniversary of their organisation in December 1937. The grotesquerie is unavoidable. Schlögel’s task is to describe one of the most notoriously violent peacetime societies in modern history at its most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the number of victims in 1937-38 was lower than Conquest estimated. But the horror has not diminished. Rather the contrary: we now know far more about the Soviet phenomenon of death by quota. Besides taking aim at former oppositionists and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in the state apparatus, the Great Terror consisted of ‘mass operations’ against whole categories of the population that were deemed dangerous: priests, Poles, de-kulakised vagrants and many others. On the other hand, historians have painted Stalinist society as a new and distinctive civilisation. In attempting to launch itself into industrial modernity, it borrowed feverishly from the rest of the world (even if it tried to conceal the fact), but it remained distinctive, if only because of the scale of the civilising mission, the speed at which it was implemented, and the social backdrop against which it was conducted. For all the chaos, violence and squalor of the times, the 1930s saw the birth of a new social order based on industrialisation, coercion and mobilisation, but buttressed by patriotism and aspirations to a socialist version of self-betterment. While most historians see both terror and civilisation as important to understanding the Soviet experience of the 1930s, they tend to spend their time investigating either one or the other. Schlögel is the first to attempt to knit them together so intricately. The title of the German edition of his book (published in 2008) makes the point absolutely clear: Terror und Traum. As he notes à propos the frenzied pageantry of parades on Red Square, ‘Everything came together: confetti parade and death-sentence plebiscite, popular celebrations and thirst for revenge, carnival extravaganza and orgies of hatred.’ Representing this chaos – keeping it chaotic without rendering it nonsensical – is a stylistic and formal problem as much as a historiographical one. Schlögel’s solution is what he calls ‘stereoscopic’ vision. The text is divided into 39 chapters ranging in length from one page to more than thirty; it takes us swiftly back and forth between show trials and executions, ‘Soviet Hollywood’ and shop windows. The grand scale is combined with the vignette. Schlögel doesn’t just change topics; he changes tone and perspective. On occasion he passes judgment; at other times he lets documents speak for themselves. When the issue is the culpability of the Soviet leadership, there is no text more powerful than Operational Order No. 00447, of 30 July 1937, which listed nine distinct ‘groups subject to punitive measures’ and set out in advance how many people were to be executed in the various administrative units of the USSR. The Eastern Siberian Region, for
