Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin

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.

Wendy Z. Goldman is the author of Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge, 1993), winner of the Berkshire Conference Book Award, as well as Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge, 2002). She has published numerous articles on Soviet social and political life and serves as the director of an exchange between Carnegie Mellon University and Russian State University for the Humanities. She has received grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research. She has served on the editorial boards of Social Science History, Gender and History, and International Labor and Working Class History.