1937: Stalin's Year of Terror

by Frederick C. Choate, Frederick S. Choate, Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin

Release Date: 20 March, 1998

Edition: Paperback

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The truth about the apocolyptic events in Russia in 1937!

The reader travels to a time and place that is as exciting and intense as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Rogovin is our link to a part of Soviet history that was left buried for decades. I was one of about 200 who heard a lecture given by him in Lansing at the University of Michigan in 1995. He presented very complex ideas about the history of his homeland with great care and lucidity. This book provides many more details and far more insights. 1937 describes what happened to Stalin's opponents and why? During his lecture in 1995 the author exhibited an impeccable knowledge of Soviet history and contemporary events which were vaticinal. Particularly, in light of the recent stockmarket crisis in Russia and globally. This book is very graphic and therefore at times difficult to read. One is placed into the courtrooms, jail cells and homes of the persecuted and one listens to conversations as though a participant. Rogovin gives voice to those who were silenced over 60 years ago. He does what other historians fail to achieve. He makes sure we understand why this knowledge is relevent for the 20, 30, 40 or 50 year-old today! I would like to remember him as the Greek writing on the Rosetta Stone that served as modern man's link to Heiroglyphics and Ancient Egypt. His book serves as our link to what many hoped would remain a mystery to the most thoughtful. Details which were obscured in a maze of bureacratic indifference and hypocricy are made clear in "1937: Stalin's year of Terror". He has helped to light our path to the truth-- past and future. I appreciate amazon.com giving me access to historical literature of such high caliber. I look forward to his next translation due out this year.

Analyzing Stalin from the Left

This book is successful and excellent on so many levels. It is not often easy to write about history, particularly something as harrowing as Stalin's purges (and final destruction of the Bolshevik Revolution)in a fluid engaging style. Perhaps a tip o' the hat to the translator is also do here. This book does just that!

More importantly, however, is that the book's author recaptures Marxist analysis from facile, superficial historical writings that equate Stalinism with "communism". In fact, Stalinism had essentially nothing to do with either Marxism or Bolshevism. Most anti-Stalinist writings are nothing more than hysterical "anti-communist" screeds devoid of true historical perspective and simply propaganda defending capitalism or "Westdern culture" and using Stalin as the example of how awful "communism" is. While covering in depth the events of 1937, Ragovin also provides an intensive analsysis of Stalin's actions and motivations as well as those of his sychophants and those who opposed him on Marxist grounds. In fact, Ragovin explains in great detail how Stalin DID have much to fear from his opponents and argues effectively that Stalin's ultimate victory over the real Bolshevik/ Marxists was not a sure thing. Although the trials and administrative executions were carried out simply to eliminate his enemies, Stalin wasn't paranoid. There were still many Bolsheviks who wanted to create a real workers state, which, had they succeeded would have destroyed Stalin and his bureaucracy of brutal henchmen.

He descibes the heroism of the anti-stalinist Marxists as well as the depravity of the Stalinists in great detail. The almost unknown history of the incredible bravery of thousands of Trotsky's followers first consigned to brutal conditions in the Gulag and finally all executed after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union is particularly poignant.

Equally devastating is his accounting of the arrest torture and executions of outstanding individuals like Russian Civil War hero Marshal Tukachevsky. He also provides a thoroughly convincing analysis of their intellectual destruction prior to signing confessions to the trumped up charges, on the one hand, while also pointing out that Stalin was correct in his mistrust of these people. If given more opportunity they most certainly would have deposed Stalin.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the real history of the Soviet Union unencumbered by "anti-communist" propaganda. Apparently Ragovin has a number of other books about the Soviet Union written on individual years concerning the events transpiring in those years, but as yet they have not been translated into English. Hopefully, they will be avaialble soon. We need much more of this accurate information on the events of those years, and how those events molded the Soviet Union and the rest of the world.