![]() While emphasising that much remains inexpressible and inexplicable, Karl Schlögel's inventive approach to sources and narrative illuminates this time and place with startling originality. Yet this enormous corpus of texts has exacerbated the sense that neither literary nor historical narrative is adequate to represent or explain the events of 1937, which played out with especial force in Moscow. ![]() Alongside this literature (most of which was published only during or after the era of glasnost ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev), an enormous archive-based historiography has also accumulated since the late 1980s, which has also started to explain how and why the Stalinist leadership carried out a disruptive and damaging purge even as war loomed. ![]() He is one of many Russian writers who have attempted to capture the atmosphere of the Soviet capital at the height of Stalinist terror. ![]() "It was especially terrifying to walk down Lub'ianka street and Komsomol alley in the summer nights of the year 1937.It seemed as though the entire enormous city was pinned down by the glinting glass gaze of the Lub'ianka." This was how the novelist Vasilii Grossman described the streets around the headquarters of the Moscow secret police in 1937 in his magnum opus Life and Fate. ![]()
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