Moscow, 1937 - Tapa dura

This book’s focus is one year, 1937, and one place, Moscow, but it is no narrow history. The narrative has sweep and depth, encompassing the mundane, the spectacular, and the nightmare dream world of Stalin’s purges. It is an incomparable book about people during one of the most grandiose and terrifying epochs of the twentieth century.
David Shearer, University of Delaware

Starting from a bird’s-eye view of the city from above, a homage to the flight of Bulgakov’s Margarita, Schlögel captures the complex specificity of a time and place of immense significance in Soviet and twentieth-century history. Schlögel brings into play an ingenious variety of sources, ranging from architectural blueprints and city directories to execution records, not forgetting diaries and literary evocations. This is a masterful, panoramic work by a gifted story-teller who is also a highly innovative, sophisticated and erudite historian.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago  

No book could be more equal to the task of restoring Stalin’s victims to Western memory than Schlögel’s Moscow, 1937 – it is an extraordinary work of scholarship, prose and remembrance. 
Times Literary Supplement

In brilliant fashion Karl Schlögel presents Moscow as a rotating stage of Soviet desire and Stalinist nightmares. Like no other author before him, he charges his prose and the sequence of scenes with the hallucinatory power of the communist project. The vertiginous and terrifying effect is his very point and singular achievement.
Jochen Hellbeck, Rutgers University

Karl Schlögel's Moscow, 1937 is a brilliant essay of "total history" on  a crucial episode of Soviet history, one of the greatest historical catastrophes of the twentieth century. This is the first book which goes beyond totalitarianism and revisionism and  brings us a completely new interpretation of this tragic event by presenting together opposing experiences and manifestations such as the preparation for universal, free, direct and secret elections and carefully planned, organized mass killings – or, in other words, Dream and Terror.

Nicolas Werth, Institut d’histoire du temps présent

Moscow, 1937: the soviet metropolis at the zenith of Stalin's dictatorship. A society utterly wrecked by a hurricane of violence. In this compelling book, the renowned historian Karl Schlogel reconstructs with meticulous care the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the 'Great Terror' during which 1 1/2 million human beings lost their lives within a single year. He revisits the sites of show trials and executions and, by also consulting numerous sources from the time, he provides a masterful panorama of these key events in Russian history. He shows how, in the shadow of the reign of terror, the regime around Stalin also aimed to construct a new society. Based on countless documents, Schlogel's historical masterpiece vividly presents an age in which the boundaries separating the dream and the terror dissolve, and enables us to experience the fear that was felt by people subjected to totalitarian rule. This rich and absorbing account of the Soviet purges will be essential reading for all students of Russia and for any readers interested in one of the most dramatic and disturbing events of modern history.