Stalin's Terror of 1937-38: Political Genocide in the USSR

This volume continues the first major study by a Russian Marxist historian of the two most fateful years in the history of the Soviet Union. Professor Vadim Rogovin demonstrates that the principle function and aim of the terror was the physical annihilation of the socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime. Moreover, Rogovin places at the very centre 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 both the USSR and abroad.

Although the second volume to appear in English, Stalin's Terror of 1937-38 is the fifth in the seven-volume history of the political conflicts in the Soviet Union and the Communist International between 1922 and 1940. All seven books in this series have been published in Russian and five in German.

See review 'Stalin’s one-sided civil war' in Socialism Today 134