Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin
The Social Dynamics of Repression

The book shows how ordinary people moved toward madness and self-destruction during the Great Terror.

Wendy Z. Goldman (Author)

9780521866149, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 August 2007

288 pages
23.6 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.506 kg

"[The] book, which has the great merit of reminding readers that there was an important social dimension to the Terror, is convincingly argued and abounds in many vivid details. It will be of value to anyone interested in the Stalin years, in particular the institutionalization of the Terror, labour history, popular mobilization, and political violence."
Canadian Journal of History, J.-Guy Lalande, St. Francis Xavier University

Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin is the first book devoted exclusively to popular participation in the 'Great Terror', a period in which millions of people were arrested, interrogated, shot, and sent to labor camps. The book shifts attention from the machinations of top Party leaders to the mechanisms by which repression engulfed Soviet society. In the unions and the factories, repression was accompanied by a mass campaign for democracy. Party leaders urged workers to criticize and remove corrupt and negligent officials. Workers, shop foremen, local Party members, and union leaders adopted the slogans of repression and used them, often against each other, to redress long-standing grievances, shift blame for intractable problems in production, and advance personal agendas. Repression quickly became a mass phenomenon; not only in the number of victims it claimed, but in the number of perpetrators it spawned. Using new, formerly secret archival sources, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin takes us into the unions and the factories to observe how ordinary people moved through clear stages toward madness and self-destruction.

1. The social crisis of industrialization
2. From murder to mass conspiracy
3. Mobilizing mass support for repression
4. The campaign for Union democracy
5. Victims and perpetrators: the organizational dynamics of terror
6. Rituals of repression in the factories.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]