num_pages: 320
description: Goldman uses cases studies of five factories in Soviet Russia during the time of terror--about 1936 to 1937--to demonstrate how quickly fear and coersion made enemies out of everyone. Not only was the party seeking out to arrest, deport, execute, certain classes of people (foreigners, engineers, intellectuals, Jews, officers, members of splinter parties ...) but it encouraged people to turn in suspected enemies--anyone who knew some one who had been singled out by the party; anyone who was related to anyone who had been singled out by the party. People turned in people because they were afraid that they would be accused of not turning in people. They turned in people who for whom they held grudges. When the party ranks and factories were decimated, the party realized people had gone to far, and so they singled out those who had ratted on the people who had already been arrested. That then pretty much took care of anyone else. Stories were fabricated and became true. Everyone had to follow one ideology or be suspect. Professing too loudly was almost as bad as not professing at all. There was no winning. Families were separate, torn apart through prison and denunciations. Communists from countries like Poland and Lithuania, came to Russia to join the party and be part of the revolution, only to be arrested as foreign spies. Russia may still be recovering from this period of terror.
language: English
title: Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin's Russia
publisher: Cambridge University Press