Moscow, 1937

An award-winning account of Stalin & rsquo;s reign of terror when 1. 5 million people lost their lives in a single year. Karl Schlogel reconstructs the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the & lsquo;Great Terror & rsquo;.

Originaltitel: Terror und Traum

Margarita's flight : 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. 'That can't be!'. Aleksandr Medvedkin's 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. 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. World-historical criminal cases: the rhetoric of the first 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. 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 flaneur: journey in the shadow of the NKVD. The phenomenology of confusion and the creation of unambiguous meaning: credo quia absurdum. Leave-taking at Belorussky Station. Moscow maps: the scene is Spain. A world in meltdown, war scare. The Soviet nation as a patriotic fighting unit. Metastases: show trial in Barcelona, the NKVD abroad. Barcelona transfer: Moscow experiences. 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 Transformation. Self-analysis, self-education, data acquisition- The shock of the missing millions. Statistics as crime. 'Business-like atmosphere'. The language of expert witnesses. The topography of the Five-Year Plan. Human sacrifice, nemesis, chorus. Postscript. The

'Lenin in October': the Revolution corrected. The USSR as a land of film, picture palaces and stars. Mosfilm 1937: chaos in the film factory. 'Volga-Volga'': directors as conspirators, actors as spies. Terror and good entertainment ; 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 Vernadsky: A patriot without fear. Excursion to the Moscow-Volga Canal: science and slave labour. After the White Sea. Baltic 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'. 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. Andre Gide: On luxury and shortages. Advertisements, window displays: objects of desire and how to presen…