“Enemies of the People” Under the Soviets

The Soviet era was a time of social and economic upheaval in Russia’s history as the Bolsheviks strove to build a socialist utopia based on the theories of Karl Marx. Central to this endeavor was the 25-year dictatorship of Josef Stalin, whose determination to make the Soviet Union a dominant industrial and military power created misery on a grand scale and caused the deaths of millions of people. Stalin arbitrarily invoked the specter of “enemies of the people” to destroy anyone who opposed the new socialist order. Millions of Soviet citizens were executed in continuous purges, and millions more perished in the slave labor camps of the Gulag. This book describes the fate of those citizens who were declared enemies of the people not because of what they had done but because of who they were. Stalin’s repression not only destroyed the best and brightest, it prevented the development of a civil society in the Soviet Union which would have promoted economic justice, the rule of law and basic human rights for all.

The late Peter Julicher taught history at Cranbrook Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for thirty-two years. He was a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, Middlebury College in Vermont and the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. He was affiliated with Greenhills School and lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Peter Julicher

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 284
Bibliographic Info: 27 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-9671-6
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1855-5
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments ix
Preface 1
A Note About Russian Names, Words, and Dates 2
Introduction 3
I. Capitalists, the Bourgeoisie, Landlords and the Romanovs 11
II. Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists and Civil War 33
III. Russian Orthodoxy and the Soviet State 48
IV. Trotsky and Trotskyism 70
V. Wreckers and Kulaks 96
VI. Old Bolsheviks, Ordinary People and the NKVD 119
VII. The Military, Foreign Communists and Repatriated POWs 150
VIII. The Creative Intelligentsia, Cosmopolitans and Jews 176
IX. The Secret Speech and Its Aftermath 201
Epilogue 210
Chapter Notes 245
Bibliography 258
Index 261