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Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
“…how thin the line between high principles and blinkered intolerance, how relative all human systems and ideologies, and how absolute the tortures which human beings inflict on one another.”
– Eugenia Ginzburg, Communist Party member, arrested 1937Beginning in the summer of 1936, workplaces and institutions throughout the Soviet Union were gripped by a rising fever of denunciation. From the shop floors of the factories to the private chambers of the highest ruling bodies, Soviet citizens actively hunted for internal enemies among their coworkers, fellow students, comrades, and colleagues. After the murder of S. M. Kirov, head of the Leningrad party organization, in December 1934, the leaders of the Communist Party had accused former oppositionists of engaging in terrorist conspiracies and begun to target them for arrest. Over the next two years, the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) arrested a wide range of people, including former leftists and rightists, industrial managers, military leaders, cultural figures, party and union officials, and entire social and national groups that were deemed to be potentially disloyal. The campaign against terrorists, spies, and industrial saboteurs attracted broad and eager popular participation. The Party, the unions, and other mass organizations urged their members to search out hidden enemies among their social and professional contacts, in their apartment buildings, on collective farms, and even within their own families. The hunt resulted in a flood of denunciations, imprisonments, and executions.
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- Inventing the EnemyDenunciation and Terror in Stalin's Russia, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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