TLS on Stalin's Terror

Forgotten atrocities of 1937

The West has never known the full scale, and the bitter ironies, of Stalinist crimes against humanity
by Jane Yager


In the part of the world that the Cold War defined as the West, only the roughest outline of the Soviet atrocities of the 1930s has entered the popular imagination: Stalin, a great terror, a great purge. As the German historian Karl Schlögel notes in Terror und Traum, a world that committed to memory the names Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz stumbled over Vorkuta, Kolyma and Magadan. Primo Levi was read; Varlam Shalamov wasn’t. And so Stalin’s victims died a second death, this time in memory.
Overshadowed not only by the Nazi Holocaust but also by the size of the Soviet death toll in the Second World War, the Stalinist atrocities were walled away on the other side of a divided Europe: the post-Mauerfall opening of Soviet archives filled in details for academics but not so much for the broader public. No book could be more equal to the task of restoring Stalin’s victims to Western memory than Schlögel’s Terror und Traum: it is an extraordinary work of scholarship, prose and remembrance.
Terror und Traum encircles the reader with a panoramic view of the city of Moscow in and around the year 1937. The book is a montage of three dozen short chapters, their settings strikingly disparate: building lots and Red Riviera cruise ships, mass graves and store display windows. Pairing the terror of the Stalinist USSR with its dreams, Schlögel reveals a Moscow of 1937 that, however horrific, is anything but drab or grey: life is “heterogeneous, chaotic, anarchic and obstinate” in this city of dizzying acceleration.
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Schlögel began his career writing about Moscow. A quarter of a century ago, he walked through Moscow armed with a 1920s city plan and Walter Benjamin’s Moskauer Tagebuch. The resultant book, Moskau lesen (“Reading Moscow”, 1984), showed the topographically minded approach to history that has become characteristic of Schlögel’s work. His subsequent essay “Die Mitte liegt ostwärts” (“The centre lies eastward”, 1986) pitched him into the Mitteleuropa debate then raging among European poets and thinkers such as George Konrad and Milan Kundera. The works that followed explored the cities of East-Central Europe – St Petersburg as a laboratory of the modern, the Berlin of Russian émigrés – as well as such overlooked “non-places” as a used car market in provincial Lithuania. In the recent theoretical work Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit (“Reading Time Through Space”, 2003), Schlögel advocated a “spatial turn”, a way of writing history with an awareness of place. Terror und Traum treats the space of the city quite differently from Moskau lesen. In 1937, Moscow was no place for a strolling flâneur. Borrowing a term from Mikhail Bakhtin, Schlögel sets forth the Moscow of 1937 as a chronotope, a specific and inextricable bundle of time and space whose defining features are despotic arbitrariness, suddenness, shock, attack out of nowhere, disappearance and the blurring of the line between reality and phantasm. The reader does not walk through 1937 Moscow but rather stands in a paralysing 360 degree view, as if looking out from the eye of a storm.
The book’s sources are rich and varied, showing both deep archival research and careful attention to the surfaces of newspapers and magazines. One of these sources is Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel of the Moscow of the 1930s, The Master and Margarita, which Schlögel anoints as a “navigation instrument” to deliver the reader into the maelstrom of his book. The first chapter of Terror und Traum joins Bulgakov’s character Margarita on her supernatural flight above Moscow. Soaring alongside Margarita, the reader views the city from above in its topographic entirety. Bulgakov’s fictional Moscow, where reality melds with the fantastical, looks a lot like Schlögel’s historical Moscow: denunciation as everyday life, vanishing characters, sudden and unexpected death.
Leaving The Master and Margarita behind, the reader is plunged into a city that was in many senses one big construction site. In central Moscow, the steel foundations of the grandiose, never-to-be-completed Palace of Soviets rose from a massive pit where six years earlier the tsars’ Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had been dynamited to rubble. This site was the most dramatic of the uncountable works in progress in a city that was being torn down and built anew, expanded and modernized at an impossible pace. As Moscow was forced overnight into a modern metropolis, 2 million displaced peasants streamed into the city within a single decade, a rural migration of historically unprecedented speed and size. Linguistically and ethnically diverse, arriving from all corners of the Soviet Union, they found a housing shortage so severe that many slept under factory work benches, in metro tunnels or in dirt burrows.
As the city lurched towards modernity, its denizens dreamt of utopia – a dream that was every bit as central to Schlögel’s Moscow of 1937 as the Terror. The athletic Soviet youth, “born or raised after the Revolution, already a child of the new order”, best embodied it: “The social mobility set off by the Russian Revolution had loosed an inexhaustible reservoir of talent and ability . . . . Stalinism is youth plus Soviet might, authoritarian power plus the beauty of the athletic body”. The “forever forward-striving” Soviet youth came into its own in 1937, a generation rising up to fill the spaces left empty by those executed and imprisoned in the purges. Although extraordinary, the expectations of Muscovites in that year were not delusional – they had, after all, seen the realization of such recently unimaginable miracles as electric lighting, running water and indoor heating.
Calling his book a “narrative of simultaneity”, Schlögel draws out harrowing ironies and concurrences. The public celebration of the opening of the Moscow–Volga Canal coincided with the execution of the overseers of its construction. A popular book praising the USSR’s affinities with the United States appeared at a time when individuals could be shot for real or imagined personal connections to America. While the Soviet secret police drew up their execution lists of the imagined internal enemy, a real external enemy was making its own “to-kill” lists for Moscow – and many of the same names appear on both the Soviet and the Nazi lists. About Red Square, Schlögel writes: “Everything converges: a ticker-tape parade and a plebiscite on killing, the atmosphere of a folk festival and the thirst for revenge, a rollicking carnival and orgies of hate. Red Square as the true arena of the year 1937: at once fairground and gallows”.
The terror that rises through the book culminates on the city’s periphery in the field of Butovo, a site where the secret police regularly conducted mass killings throughout 1937 and 1938. A secret police order of July 30, 1937, set forward execution and arrest quotas to be filled in each region of the Soviet Union: the authorities in Western Siberia, for example, had four months to find 5,000 “Category 1” Trotskyite terrorists to execute and 12,000 somewhat less menacing “Category 2” terrorists to imprison for eight to ten years. In Butovo, as throughout the book, Schlögel handles the voices of the dead with unhurried grace: lengthy quotations from eyewitnesses mingle with gruesome secret police charts and instructions.
A voice given surprisingly little exposure in Terror und Traum is that of Stalin. The reader encounters him primarily through the eyes of a foreign visitor, Lion Feuchtwanger, a Jewish German anti-fascist who, as a bestselling novelist, was granted a three-hour private reception with Stalin on the eve of the second show trial. Terror und Traum is about Stalinism, but – in contrast to much of what has been written about this context – it is not concerned with Stalin himself. He is granted no priority above the book’s hundreds of other subjects.
Schlögel also explores how Moscow came to reach a point of rupture in European civilization, a “bacchanal of self-destruction”, an “excess within excess”. Without trying to explain what happened, he offers a concrete motive for the massacres of 1937. It is no coincidence, he argues, that the Politburo order for the executions that were to be carried out in places like Butovo came on the same day that rules and regulations for free elections were issued. Elimination of anyone who could pose a threat to Stalin’s power necessarily preceded the vote. “The fiction of ‘free, general, secret elections’ and the ‘cleansing’ of society were two sides of the same process, the manufacturing of the ‘unity of the Soviet people’.” Though there are motives in this Moscow, there is no overarching theory.
In Terror und Traum, the author dedicates his abilities as a writer and scholar not to a thesis but to a task. In his acceptance speech for the Sigmund Freud Prize in 2004, Schlögel spoke of the historian’s task of bringing the living and the dead to Augenhöhe – eye level – with one another. The illiterate farmers who signed with an X the confession to a capital crime made up of words they couldn’t read, the doomed geologists and polar explorers who made the USSR rich by mapping its natural resources only to find themselves bound for the firing squad. With a magician’s aplomb, Schlögel retrieves from oblivion these together with countless other faces, bringing them not only to equal footing with the reader, but also palpably close.

Karl Schlögel
TERROR UND TRAUM
Moskau 1937
816pp. Hanser. 29.90 euros.
978 3 446 23081 1

Jane Yager is a freelance writer and translator living in Berlin.