My Amazon Review of Karl Schlogel's "Moscow, 1937"

Darkness at Noon*

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.

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