KARL SCHLÖGEL is Professor of Eastern European History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt. Moscow, 1937 was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2009.

Preface x

Acknowledgements xiii

Reproduction Acknowledgements xvii

Translator's Note xx

Introduction 1

1 Navigation: Margarita's Flight 10
Margarita's fl ight - Manuscripts don't burn: a writer in 1937 - Relief map of the city, locations, staging posts - Dramatis personae and their portrayal: dual characters - NKVD, the organization - 'People vanished from their apartments without trace' - Sudden deaths, execution as spectacle - 'It can't be!'

2 Moscow as a Construction Site: Stalin's General Plan in Action 33
Aleksandr Medvedkin's film New Moscow - A new cityscape: Stalin's General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow - Moscow as a construction site: between demolition and new construction - Moscow beyond the ring roads - Human landscape, struggle for survival

3 A Topography of the Disappeared: The Moscow Directory of 1936 54
Snapshot of the status quo: directories as documents of their age - Topography of power and other locations - Traces of the disappeared - Lists of people to be shot and the posthumous reconstruction of their addresses

4 The Creation of Enemies: The Criminal Prosecution of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre, 19 - 24 August 1936 68
World-historical criminal cases: the rhetoric of the fi rst Moscow show trial - The echo of violence: how a latent civil war comes to be articulated in language - 'Double-dealers' - The birth of the show trial from the spirit of lynch-law - The ideal enemy

5 'Tired of the Effort of Observing and Understanding': Lion Feuchtwanger's Moscow 1937 81
A key scene in European intellectual history: Feuchtwanger's meeting with Stalin - The impotence of the anti-fascist movement: how to generate a point of view - The end of the fl âneur: journey in the shadow of the NKVD - The phenomenology of confusion and the creation of unambiguous meaning: credo quia absurdum - Leave-taking at Belorusskii Station

6 In the Glare of Battle: Spain and Other Fronts 95
Moscow maps: the scene is Spain - A world in meltdown, war scare - The Soviet nation as a patriotic fi ghting unit - Metastases: show trial in Barcelona, the NKVD abroad - Barcelona transfer: Moscow experiences

7 Blindness and Terror: The Suppressed Census of 1937 109
A journey into the interior of society - 6 January 1937: snapshot of an empire - Ten years after the census of 1926: balance sheet after the Great Leap Forward - Self-analysis, self-education, data acquisition - The shock of the missing millions - Statistics as crime

8 A Stage for the Horrors of Industrialization: The Second Moscow Show Trial in January 1937 125
'The Business-like atmosphere' - The language of expert witnesses - The topography of the Five-Year Plan - Human sacrifi ce, nemesis, chorus - Postscript

9 'A Feast in the Time of Plague': The Pushkin Jubilee of 10 February 1937 144
The New York Times: 'All Russia was Pushkin-mad today' - 'Comrade Pushkin': consecration of a classic - A feast in the time of plague: coded discourses - Platitudes of a new culture - Russian genius and imperial rule

10 Public Death: Ordzhonikidze's Suicide and Death Rites 160
The shock: Sergo is dead - Escape into ritual - Suicide as a weapon - A hopeless situation and protest - Death as a group experience: speaking of death in times of mass murder

11 The Engine Room of the Year 1937: The February-March Plenum of the Central Committee 177
A leadership at its wits' end: the voice of panic - Testing the limits and exceeding them: the Party indicts Bukharin and Rykov - The shock: 'universal, free, secret elections' - Audit report: ungovernability and fear of chaos - Wreckers at work in the NKVD - The dissolution of the Party and the creation of a new one - Setting the machinery in motion

12 Moscow in Paris: The USSR Pavilion at the International Exhibition of 1937 198
The exhibition trail: a journey through the map of the Soviet Union - The theme park of twentieth-century civilization - Marginal encounters

13 Red Square: Parade Ground and Place of Execution 209

14 Chopin Concert and Killing Ritual: Radio and the Creation of the Great Community 215
Radiofi katsia: the two faces of progress - Radio as the background noise of the new age - The sphere of feelings - Radio listeners as 'citizens of the world' - Stalin: the original soundtrack: the direction of the historical moment - Wreckers at work in the ether

15 Soviet Art Deco: Time Preserved in Stone 229
The First All-Union Congress of Architects, 16-26 June 1937 - Moscow as a building site - Chaos and stress - The Soviet universe as exhibition - The creation of a new style during a state of emergency - Closing speech: Frank Lloyd Wright

16 'Brown Bodies, Gaily Coloured Shorts': Sports Parade 248
'The glorious beauty of young people' - Fizkul'turnik, fi zkul'turnitsa: icons of the new age - 'Stalin's tribe': tableaux vivants in Red Square

17 Wealth and Destruction: The Seventeenth International Geology Congress in Moscow 256
The emergence of Soviet geologists: science and the dream of an affluent nation - Pioneers the nation does not need: geologists as enemies of the people - Vladimir Vernadskii: a patriot without fear - Excursion to the Moscow-Volga Canal: science and slave labour

18 A City by the Sea: The Opening of the Moscow-Volga Canal 274
After the White Sea Canal: Stalin's second arterial highway - A canal as a Gesamtkunstwerk: the aesthetics of a man-made riverscape - Dmitlag, the Gulag Archipelago at the gates of the capital: the parallel society of the camp zone - Perekovka/ reforging: the laboratory of the new man - 'I have seen a country that has been transformed into one great camp'

19 Year of Adventures, 1937: A Soviet Icarus 294
Triumphs, records: a city in a fever - Non-stop to America - The conquest of the Arctic - Twentieth-century adventures - Heroes of the age: Stalin's aviators - 'There are thousands of dreamers like me' - 'Bolshevik romanticism' and terror

20 Moscow as Shop-Window: The Abundance of the World, Hungry for Goods and Dizzy with Hunger 314
André Gide: on luxury and shortages - Advertisements, window displays: objects of desire and how to present them - Dizzy with hunger - A hopeless struggle: a nation of speculators - The queue as grapevine

21 Open Spaces, Dream Landscapes: Cruising on the Volga, Holidaying on the Red Riviera, Conspiracies in the Dachas 326

22 The National Bolshevik Nikolai Ustrialov: His Return Home and Death 332
Returning home from exile: establishing contact with the new Russia - National Bolshevism and Stalin's 'Socialism in One Country' - The world of 'former people' and 1937 - A double reading: a diary with comments by the NKVD

23 Celebrating the October Revolution on 7 November 1937 344
In the diplomats' box - Conversations in the inner circle of power

24 A Miniature of High Society before the Massacre 355
The bombs come closer - Beau monde, illustrious society - Masked ball at the American Embassy - Interior with piano and nursemaid - Yezhov's salon: art and the secret police - Postscript: inventory of luxury and fashion

25 Soviet Hollywood: Miracles and Monsters 372
Lenin in October: the Revolution corrected - The USSR as a land of film, picture palaces and stars - Mosfi lm 1937: chaos in the film factory - Volga-Volga: directors as conspirators, actors as spies - Terror and good entertainment

26 Death in Exile 387
Dimitrov's diary: a record of self-destruction - Vanishing point Moscow: biotope - Foreign comrades - Vulnerability: world communism as world conspiracy - Lists, dossiers and card indexes

27 Arcadia in Moscow: Stalin's Luna Park 404
'A centre of culture and rest' - 'What a summer!' - The locus of public opinion

28 'Avtozavodtsy': The Workforce of the Stalin Car Factories 413
'Shanghai': city of immigrants, city on the periphery - Ivan Likhachev, captain of industry - Factory patriotism: the factory as melting pot - 'Mass criticism', or the orchestration of hatred and despair

29 Dzhaz: The Sound of the Thirties 433
Dzhaz (Utesov) - Songs for the masses (Dunaevskii) - Classical music (Shostakovich)

30 Changing Faces, Changing Times 444

31 America, America: The Other New World 450
Ili' a Il' f and Evgenii Petrov's journey to America - Special relations: Soviet Americanism and the New Deal - The American way of life in 1937 - Utopia as present-day reality

32 'I Know of No Other Country . . .': 1937 and the Production of Soviet Space 463
The birth of the Soviet Union from the spirit of songs for the masses - Moscow as an image-making machine - Homogenizing labour: purges and the unity of the Soviet nation

33 The Butovo Shooting Range: Topography of the Great Terror 472
Looking for traces: the archaeology of the graveyard - Mass murder on the outskirts of the city - Sociology of the mass grave - Killing by quota: Order No. 00447 - World war, civil war

34 Lonely White Sail . . .: Dreamtime, Children's Worlds 505

35 Yezhov at the Bolshoi Theatre: Celebrating Twenty Years of the Cheka 510
At the heart of Moscow: power made visible - Celebratory speeches and music between the mass murders - Ovations for the executioners: morituri salutant

36 Bukharin Takes his Leave 519
Bukharin's final...