1937: Stalin's Year of Terror
1937: Stalin's Year of Terror is the first major study by a Russian Marxist historian of the most tragic and fateful year in the history of the Soviet Union. Possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet source material, including archival documents that have only recently been released, Professor Vadim Rogovin presents a detailed and penetrating analysis of the causes, impact and consequences of Stalin's purges. Rogovin demonstrates that the principal function and aim of the terror was the physical annihilation of the substantial socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime. Moreover, Rogovin places at the very center of this historical tragedy the crucial political figure whom most contemporary historians tend, for various ideological reasons, to ignore: Leon Trotsky. Rogovin insists that it is impossible to understand the purges apart from Stalin's determination to stamp out all vestiges of Trotsky's influence which, despite years of repression, had remained a powerful current with considerable support and revolutionary potential within the USSR. Although the first to be translated into the English language, 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror is the fourth volume in a projected six-volume history of the political conflicts within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist International between 1922 and 1940. Five volumes of this series have already been published, to steadily growing acclaim, in Russia. The sixth volume will be completed before the end of 1998. All six volumes will be translated into English and published by Mehring Books. --wsws.org