Product Description

Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin is the first book devoted exclusively to popular participation in the ‘Great Terror’, a period in which millions of people were arrested, interrogated, shot, and sent to labor camps. The book shifts attention from the machinations of top Party leaders to the mechanisms by which repression engulfed Soviet society. In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local Party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances, shift blame for intractable problems in production, and advance personal agendas. Repression quickly became a mass phenomenon; not only in the number of victims it claimed, but in the number of perpetrators it spawned. Using new, formerly secret archival sources, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin takes us into the unions and the factories to observe how ordinary people moved through clear stages toward madness and self-destruction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #777320 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

Review
“More than any study I know, Goldman’s book brings dramatically to life the day to day reality of the Stalinist Terror. Her accounts of factory meetings are so vivid that you think you are actually there, listening to real people debating, arguing, and betraying one another. Even more important, the book will force us all to rethink our understanding of Stalinism and the dynamics of state repression. This book is a remarkable achievement.”
– Donald Filtzer, University of East London

“This is an important study not only for Soviet historians but for historians interested in labor history, social history, and modern Europe. It will also be of interest to political scientists and sociologists interested in political violence, popular mobilization, and populist components of terror. Goldman captures the complexity of the 1930s, and her book elegantly tells a story that, like real life, is not easy to tell. Avoiding simplistic approaches, she provides a realistic account characterized by confusion, unintended consequences, shifting alliances, and chaos. In doing so, she makes extensive and skillful use of heretofore unexploited and inaccessible archival collections. She uses these unique documents to tell the story of terror and populist ‘democracy’ in the party organizations and factories of Moscow.”
- J. Arch Getty, Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles

“What does it mean to live inside the Great Terror? Wendy Goldman's richly detailed study adds a new important dimension to our debates on the nature of Stalin's dictatorship in general and on mechanics of the terror in particular.”
- Oleg Khlevniuk, author of The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror

“In a vivid, analytical narrative Wendy Goldman explores the paradox of Stalin's paroxysm of terror of the late 1930s and the rhetoric – as well as practices – of democracy that accompanied it. Rather than simply a top-down policy of repression or the spontaneous eruption of resentment and revenge from below, the Great Purges are shown to have metastasized from a campaign against party oppositionists into mass arrests and killings of activists, kulaks, and workers. Democratic slogans, even multi-candidate secret ballot elections, were employed to mobilize the rank-and-file in an effort to expel old leaders and ‘revive’ petrified bureaucratic institutions. Professor Goldman gives us the most compelling account to date of how victims and victimizers unwittingly collaborated and consequently destroyed hundreds of thousands of their countrymen and fatally wounded the first ‘socialist’ experiment.”
-Ronald Grigor Suny, Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History, The University of Michigan, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and History, The University of Chicago

"This important, readable book sheds light on a critical phase in Soviet history."
Brian Bonhomme, Youngstown State University, The Russian Review

About the Author
Wendy Z. Goldman is the author of Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge, 1993), winner of the Berkshire Conference Book Award, as well as Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge, 2002). She has published numerous articles on Soviet social and political life and serves as the director of an exchange between Carnegie Mellon University and Russian State University for the Humanities. She has received grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research. She has served on the editorial boards of Social Science History, Gender and History, and International Labor and Working Class History.

Customer Reviews

A corrective on the Great Terror
Wendy Goldman's "Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin" is intended as a corrective to many of the common accounts of the Great Terror, the period of Stalinist super-repression in 1937-1938. Many books, of varying quality, have already been written about this episode in history, and Goldman's is not yet another overview. Rather, she analyzes carefully to what extent the Terror can be said to have come from above and to what extent it came from below, and she also discusses the role that the simultaneously introduced campaign for democratic elections in the lower ranks and the workers' unions played in the Terror's unfolding.

Goldman shows quite well that the Terror was entirely within the control of Stalin and his assistants, but that its scope and functioning was not actually an entirely top-down affair. Because Stalin had closed off even the independence of the unions, the workers and lower rank bureaucrats had lost their last avenue for protesting against government decisions as well as local policies, and the terror campaign against oppositionists, real and imaginary, deprived the workers from the possibility of public criticism and debate within the Party as well. The result was that as Stalin increased his campaign against intra-Party opposition to his quite unpopular policies, people could, to have their grievances heard and attention paid to their problems, only resort to speaking in terms of denunciations and accusations of "wrecking", "sabotage", "oppositionism" etc. More and more, both within and without the Party, paranoia grew and accusations were flung back and forth as everyone tried to protect themselves and sometimes others from the possibility of being denounced as a "wrecker" over problems outside their control. This contributed to a sizable extent to the very rapid expansion of the scope of the Terror.

At the same time, Stalin's campaign for the democratization of unions and other lower rank positions destroyed the capacity of lower and middle level bureaucrats to use their power and collaboration with others to escape the impact of the Terror itself: the elections made it impossible for bureaucrats to use appointments to positions as a way to get a reliable group of supporters, and it also led to much infighting and power struggling within the bureaucracy, where everyone tried to accuse each other of structural problems in the heavily dislocated economy. In this way, the democratization campaign (quickly abandoned after 1939), either by accident or design, added to the Terror's impact by making every level of the bureaucracy directly vulnerable to political repression.

The problem with this book however is that it relies for a great deal on many different sources from different factories and workplaces, from which we have NKVD reports of comments overheard, letters sent to higher officials, etc. Goldman uses these consistently to prove her various points, but since we have no idea of how representative any given of these comments, letters, statements, speeches etc. were of public opinion at any given time, and Goldman doesn't tell us, it is all basically anecdotal evidence. It is therefore quite unclear what the value is of the long summaries of anecdotes about the variety of viewpoints expressed by workers and bureaucrats in different situations, and this makes the status of a large part of the book rather uncertain. Moreover, aside from Goldman's point about the Terror not being an entirely top-down undertaking, it is not very clear what she exactly wants to prove to us; instead, we get more of an impression of the atmosphere of those days than a real analysis (except for a small part on economic problems at the beginning, which was in my view far more interesting). And since we don't know what the relative 'weight' of her anecdotes are, we can't even say that it does that well or not.

It's not that Goldman hasn't done much work in this book or that it is not well-written, but it's rather the lack of clarity about both the value and the purpose of the elements in the book that make me give it such a (relatively) low rating. Still, it may be worth reading for people with a very specific interest in Soviet history.