Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  10 ‘Poet v ssylke’, Pravda, 13 February 1937.

  11 Sandler, ‘The 1937 Pushkin jubilee as epic trauma’, p. 196.

  12 Pravda, 1 February 1937; photo with Pushkin’s descendants, Pravda, 9 February 1937.

  13 Aleksandr S. Pushkin, ‘K Chaadaevu’, in A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow, 1981), vol. 1, p. 207; quoted here from: http://blogsmail.ru/mail/mrrawat/5E70C425F7E22E46.html.

  14 Pravda, 10 February 1937.

  15 Aleksandr S. Pushkin, ‘Exegi monumentum: ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi’, in Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, vol. 2, p. 295. The line inserted by Vasilii Zhukovskii, ‘… prelestno zhivoi stikhov / Ia byl polezen’, was replaced by Pushkin’s original verse, which ran: ‘… v moi zhestokii vek / Vosslavil ia svobodu’, and, instead of ‘ia dolgo budu tem narodu / ia lubezen’, the correct version now reads: ‘… ia lubezen narodu’. I owe thanks to Natalia E. Smirnova, Moscow, for this information. [The present translation is taken from: http://blogs.mail.ru/mail/mrrawat/5E70C425F7E22E46.html.]

  16 Lev Nikulin, ‘Triumf poeta’, Pravda, 11 February 1937.

  17 Pravda, 6 February 1937.

  18 Needless to say, the community of Pushkin experts was not spared by the Terror, as we can see from the fate of Sergei Y. Gessen (1903–1937) and Lev B. Modzalevskii (1902–1948).

  19 B. A. Babochkin, ‘Pushkin pobeditel'’, quoted from Molok, Pushkin v 1937 godu, pp. 53–5.

  20 Ibid., p. 54.

  21 Illustration from Krokodil 3 (1937).

  22 ‘“The glory of the Russian People”, Pravda, 10 February 1937’, in Platt and Brandenberger (eds), Epic Revisionism, pp. 214–19.

  23 See, e.g. Vadim Perel'muter (ed.), Pushkin v emigratsii: 1937 (Moscow, 1999).

  24 Semën L. Frank, Etiudy o Pushkine (Paris, 1987), p. 31.

  25 Ibid., pp. 40, 42, 46–7.

  26 Ibid., pp. 54, 57.

  27 Jelena Bulgakowa, Margarita und der Meister: Tagebücher, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1993), p. 156.

  28 See Sandler, ‘The 1937 Pushkin jubilee as epic trauma’.

  29 Andrei Platonov, ‘Pushkin – nash tovarishch’, in Andrei Platonov, Velichie prostykh serdets (Moscow, 1976), pp. 277–91; Platonov, ‘Pushkin i Gorky’, ibid., pp. 292–313.

  30 Platonov, ‘Pushkin i Gorky’, pp. 290–1.

  31 Ibid., p. 304.

  32 Ibid., p. 313.

  33 This is the poem ‘Svetlaia radost'’, cited in Wladislaw Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938: Planung, Inszenierung und Wirkung (Berlin, 2003), p. 268.

  34 ‘Pir vo vremia chumy’, in Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, vol. 4, pp. 329–37 [translation by Angela Livingstone].

  35 Mikhail Zoshchenko, ‘What I would like to say about the late poet’, Krokodil 5 (1937), ‘A speech given during the Pushkin days at a meeting of the tenants’ cooperative on Malaia Perinnaia, no. 7’, Krokodil 5 (1937), in Platt and Brandenberger (eds), Epic Revisionism, pp. 220–32.

  36 Andreĭ Platonov: ‘Pushkin – nash tovarishch’, pp. 277–8.

  37 Istoriia Moskvy, Vol. 6: Period postroenia sotsializma (1917g.–iiun' 1941g.), Book 2 (Moscow, 1959), p. 126.

  38 Ibid., p. 167.

  39 Ibid., p. 240.

  40 Ibid., p. 288.

  41 Kornei I. Chukovskii, quoted in Molok, Pushkin v 1937 godu, p. 20.

  Chapter 10 Public Death

  1 Jelena Bulgakowa, Margarita und der Meister: Tagebücher, Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1993), p. 158.

  2 Georgi Dimitroff, Tagebücher 1933–1943, ed. Bernhard H. Bayerlein, trans. Wladislaw Hedeler and Birgit Schliewenz (Berlin, 2000), vol. 1, p. 150.

  3 Véronique Garros, Thomas Lahusen and Natalija Korenewskaja (eds), Das wahre Leben: Tagebücher aus der Stalinzeit (Berlin, 1998), p. 77.

  4 Nina Kosterina, Das Tagebuch der Nina Kosterina (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), p. 24.

  5 Garros et al. (eds), Das wahre Leben, p. 119.

  6 Aleksandr Weissberg-Cybulski, Im Verhör (Vienna and Zurich, 1993), p. 71.

  7 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (London, 1973), p. 262.

  8 Oleg V. Khlevniuk, 1937-i: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoie obshchestvo (Moscow, 1992), pp. 131–2.

  9 Ibid., pp. 139–41.

  10 Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 260. On the relations between Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: konflikty v Politburo v 30–e gody (Moscow, 1993).

  11 Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 261.

  12 Pravda, 19 February 1937.

  13 Ibid., p. 5.

  14 Ibid., p. 4.

  15 Pravda, 20 February 1937, p. 1.

  16 Bulgakowa, Margarita und der Meister, entry for 19 February 1937.

  17 Ibid., entry for 20 March 1937.

  18 André Gide, Back from the USSR, trans. Dorothy Bussy (London, 1937), pp. 25–6.

  19 Dimitroff, Tagebücher 1933–1943, entry for 21 February 1937.

  20 Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (London, 1972), pp. 195–6; Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 258–66; Khlevniuk, 1937-j, pp . 116–44; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York, 2004), pp. 210–18.

  21 Irina Paperno, ‘Constructing the meaning of suicide’, in Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (eds), Imperial Russia (Bloomington, IN, 1998), pp. 305–30; Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1997). For the general discussion of suicide, see Alfred Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York, 1971); Jack D. Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide (Princeton, NJ, 1967).

  22 Kosterina, Das Tagebuch der Nina Kosterina, p. 43 (13 April 1938).

  23 Georgii V. Andreevskii, Povsednevnaia zhizn' Moskvy v stalinskuiu epokhu 1930–1940-e gody (Moscow, 2003), p. 240.

  24 Lorenz Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis: Kommunikation und Herrschaft unter Stalin (1917–1953) (Munich, 2008), p. 262.

  25 Khlevniuk, 1937-i, p. 196. For suicide among the young, see Vera Spiertz, ‘Geheime Berichte über den Freitod junger Rotarmisten (1923–1927)’, and Monica Wellmann, ‘Integrationsprobleme und Ausgrenzungserfahrungen: Abschiedsbriefe junger Selbstmörder aus Moskau (20er Jahre)’, both in Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, Stefan Plaggenborg and Monika Wellmann (eds), Sowjetjugend 1917–1941: Generation zwischen Revolution und Resignation (Essen, 2001).

  26 Feliks F. Perchenok, Repressirovannye geologi: biograficheskiye materialy (St Petersburg, 1992), p. 121.

  27 Erren, ‘Selbstkritik’ und Schuldbekenntnis, p. 180.

  28 Khlevniuk, 1937-i, p. 19; Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

  29 Wladislaw Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938: Planung, Inszenierung und Wirkung (Berlin, 2003), p. 624.

  30 Solomon Wolkow, Stalin und Schostakowitsch: Der Diktator und der Künstler (Berlin, 2004), pp. 195, 203.

  31 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), p. 315.

  32 Ibid., pp. 321–2.

  33 Khlevniuk, 1937-i, p. 201. Voroshilov spoke in similar terms; cf. Wadim Rogowin, 1937: Jahr des Terrors (Essen, 1998), pp. 265–6.

  34 Getty and Naumov (eds), The Road to Terror, pp. 337–8.

  35 Ibid., p. 442.

  36 Khlevniuk, 1937-i, p. 62.

  37 William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001), p. 281.

  38 Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 259.

  39 Khlevniuk, 1937-i, p. 122.

  40 Getty and Naumov (eds), The Road to Terror, pp. 292–4.

  41 Khlevniuk, 1937-i, pp. 131, 133 and 287.

  42 Ibid., p. 119.

  43 Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 195–6.

  44 Valentina B. Zhiromskaia, Demograficheskaia istoriia Rossii v 1930-e gody: vzgliad v neizvestnoie (Moscow, 2001), p. 25.

  45 Khlevniu
k, 1937-i, p. 207.

  46 Butovskii poligon 1937: kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii, no. 8 (Moscow, 2004), p. 332.

  47 Wladislaw Hedeler (ed.), Stalinscher Terror 1934–41: Eine Forschungsbilanz (Berlin, 2002), p. 20; Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov 1895–1940 (Stanford, CA, 2002), p. 62.

  48 Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, p. 142.

  49 Ibid., p. 144.

  50 Alexander Vatlin, Tatort Kunzewo: Opfer und Täter des Stalinschen Terrors 1937/38 (Berlin, 2003), p. 66.

  51 Jansen and Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner, p. 177.

  52 Ibid., p. 171, n. 253.

  53 Ibid., pp. 169, 170.

  54 Andrei Arschilowski, in Garros et al. (eds), Das wahre Leben, pp. 77, 79, 119.

  Chapter 11 The Engine Room of the year 1937

  1 Georgi Dimitroff, Tagebücher 1933–1943, ed. Bernhard H. Bayerlein, trans. Wladislaw Hedeler und Birgit Schliewenz (Berlin, 2000), vol. 1, p. 152, entry of 5 March 1937.

  2 The caricatures have since been published, and provided with a commentary, in Alexander Vatlin and Larisa Malashenko (eds), Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution: Bolshevik Self-Portraits, trans. Vadim A. Staklo, foreword by Simon Sebag Montefiore (New Haven, CT, and London, 2006), illustrations nos. 169–81.

  3 The transcripts quoted from here were published between 1992 and 1999 in the journal Voprosy istorii [ Vi], as ‘Materialy fevral'sko-martovskogo plenuma

  CK VKP(B) 1937’:

  23 February – evening session, Vi 2–3 (1992), pp. 3–44.

  23 February – evening session, Vi 4–9 (1992), pp. 3–36.

  24 February – evening session, Vi 6–7 (1994), pp. 3–29.

  25 February – morning session, Vi 8–9 (1992), pp. 3–29.

  26 February – evening session, Vi 5 (1993), pp. 3–23.

  27 February – morning session, Vi 6 (1993), pp. 3–36.

  27 February – evening session, Vi 1 (1994), pp. 12–13.

  27 February – evening session, Vi 7 (1993), pp. 3–24.

  28 February – morning session, Vi 8 (1993), pp. 3–26.

  28 February – evening session, Vi 9 (1993), pp. 3–32.

  1 March – evening session, Vi 2 (1994), pp. 3–29.

  1 March – evening session, Vi 6 (1994), pp. 3–23.

  2 March – morning session, Vi 8 (1994), pp. 3–29.

  3 March – evening session, Vi 3 (1995), pp. 3–15.

  3 March – morning session, Vi 4 (1995), pp. 3–18.

  3 March 1937 – evening session, Vi 2 (1999), pp. 3–26.

  4 March 1937 – morning session, Vi 4 (1999), pp. 3–18.

  4 March – morning session, Vi 10 (1995), pp. 3–26.

  4 March – evening session, Vi 7 (1995), pp. 3–25.

  5 March – evening session, Vi 8 (1995), pp. 3–25.

  5 March – evening session, Vi 11 (1995), pp. 12, 3–23.

  4 Vi 2–3 (1992), pp. 3–44.

  5 For the Piatakov trial, see chapter 8, ‘A Stage for the Horrors of Industrialization’, in the present volume.

  6 See chapter 10, ‘Public Death’, in this volume.

  7 The most thorough accounts of the plenum of February–March are those of 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), and, above all, of Wladislaw Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938: Planung, Inszenierung und Wirkung (Berlin, 2003), pp. 160–206.

  8 Wadim S. Rogowin, 1937: Jahr des Terrors, trans. Hannelore Georgi and Harald Schubärth (Essen, 1998), pp. 269–70.

  9 For an account of his appearance at the plenum, see ibid., p. 257.

  10 Bukharin’s letter to the plenum, 20 February 1937, in Vi 2–3 (1992), p. 5.

  11 Quoted in Rogowin, 1937: Jahr des Terrors, p. 274; Vi 6–7 (1994), p. 9.

  12 Pavel Postyshev, in Vi 8–9 (1992), p. 24.

  13 Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938, pp. 177–8; Getty and Naumov (eds), The Road to Terror, pp. 412–13, Document 143.

  14 Formulated in the resolution at the end of the debate, evening session of 27 February 1937, in Vi 7 (1993), pp. 3–24.

  15 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

  16 Vi 6 (1993), p. 15.

  17 Vi 5 (1993), pp. 3–5.

  18 Ibid., p. 6.

  19 Ibid., p. 16.

  20 Vi 6 (1993), p. 8.

  21 Vi 7 (1993), p. 5.

  22 Yaroslavskii, in Vi 5 (1993), p. 16.

  23 Vi 6 (1993), pp. 5–6, 7–8.

  24 Vi 7 (1993), pp. 17, 20.

  25 Vi 8 (1993), p. 8.

  26 Ibid., p. 19.

  27 Vi 9 (1993), p. 4.

  28 Vi 1 (1994), p. 15.

  29 Vi 2 (1994), p. 6.

  30 Ibid., p. 13.

  31 Vi 10 (1994), pp. 3–27.

  32 Ibid., p. 13.

  33 According to Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938, pp. 185, 189, 191, 196.

  34 Vi 10 (1994), pp. 13–27.

  35 Vi 2 (1995), p. 21.

  36 Ibid., p. 12.

  37 Ibid., p. 16.

  38 Vi 3 (1995), pp. 3–15.

  39 Resolution, in Vi 2 (1995), p. 22.

  40 Ibid., p. 16.

  41 Vi 3 (1995), p. 11.

  42 Ibid., p. 14.

  43 Vi 4 (1995), p. 15.

  44 Vi 7 (1995), pp. 11–12.

  45 Ibid., p. 17.

  46 Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938, p. 172.

  47 Vi 8 (1995), pp. 22–3.

  48 Vi 6 (1993), p. 5.

  49 Vi 9 (1993), p. 28.

  50 Voroshilov, in Vi 8 (1994), p. 12

  51 Malenkov, in Vi 10 (1995), p. 5.

  52 Stalin’s closing statement, in Vi 11 (1995), p. 22.

  53 Ibid., p. 18.

  54 Malenkov, in Vi 10 (1995), p. 6.

  55 Vi 3 (1995), p. 6.

  56 It is the achievement of J. Arch Getty to have focused our attention on the clash of these two movements, in Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge, 1985).

  57 Vi 11 (1995), pp. 18–20.

  Chapter 12 Moscow in Paris

  1 Pravda, no. 113, 24 April 1937, and no. 133.

  2 Pravda, no. 240, 31 August 1937.

  3 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Review May to October 1850’, Collected Works (London, 1978), vol. 10, p. 500; Années 30 en Europe: le temps menaçant 1929–1939: exposition du 20 février au 25 mai 1997, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris, 1997).

  4 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), p. 8.

  5 Bertrand Lemoine, ‘Die Ausstellung von 1937’, in Jürgen Harten, Hans-Werner Schmidt and Marie Luise Syring (eds), ‘ Die Axt hat geblüht …’: Europäische Konflikte der 30er Jahre in Erinnerung an die frühe Avantgarde (Düsseldorf, 1987), p. 145.

  6 Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR, 1920–1930-e gody: materialy i dokumenty (Moscow, 2006), p. 5.

  7 Ibid., p. 217.

  8 Ibid., Document 91; David Arkin, ‘Arkhitekturny obraz strany sovetov: pavilion SSSR na mezhdunarodnoi vystavke v Parizhe’, in Arkhitektura i skulptura (Moscow, 1938), p. 218.

  9 See the description in Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR, pp. 216–18, and Maria Christina Zopff, ‘Ein Rundgang im sowjetischen Pavillon’, in ‘Die Axt hat geblüht…’, pp. 426–9.

  10 Zopff, ‘Ein Rundgang im sowjetischen Pavillon’, p. 427, n. 6.

  11 Paintings are reproduced in Harten et al. (eds), ‘ Die Axt hat geblüht …’, p. 448.

  12 Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR, p. 217.

  13 The model is illustrated in Harten et al. (eds), ‘ Die Axt hat geblüht …’, p. 428.

  14 Vystavochnye ansambli SSSR, p. 90.

  15 The Great Hall is illustrated in Harten et al. (eds), ‘ Die Axt hat geblüht …’, p. 429.


  16 Ibid.

  17 Architects of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris 16e: Jean-Claude Dondel, André Aubert, Paul-Jean-Emile Viard, Marcel Dastugue, according to Harten et al. (eds), ‘ Die Axt hat geblüht …’, pp. 124–5.

  18 Dieter Bartetzko, ‘Tödliches Lächeln – Der deutsche Ausstellungspavillon von Albert Speer’, in Harten et al. (eds), ‘ Die Axt hat geblüht …’, p. 339.

  19 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London, 1970), p. 81.

  20 Lemoine, ‘Die Ausstellung von 1937’, p. 141.

  21 Romy Golan, ‘Das Bild der modernen Welt’, in Harten et al. (eds), ‘ Die Axt hat geblüht …’, pp. 151–2.

  22 www.exposeum.de (accessed July 2008).

  23 Paris 1937: Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, cited according to http://expo2000.de/expo2000/geschichte/(accessed July 2008).

  24 On Russian Paris, see Marina Gorboff, La Russie fantôme: l’émigration russe de 1920 à 1950 (Lausanne, 1995); Elena Menegaldo, Russkie v Parizhe 1919– 1939 (Moscow, 2001).

  25 On the Krivitsky, Reiss und Malli (Mann) cases, see Aleksandr Orlow, Kreml-Geheimnisse (Würzburg, 1953), pp. 267–74, in the chapter on the liquidation of the Chekists; cf. also www.wonder.ru/alex (accessed July 2008).