Moscow, 1937

Navigation : Margarita's flight. Margarita's flight -- Manuscripts don't burn : a writer in 1937 -- Relief map of the city, locations, staging posts -- Dramatis personae and their portrayal : dual characters -- NKVD, the organization -- 'People vanished from their apartments without trace' -- Sudden deaths, execution as spectacle -- 'It can't be!' -- Moscow as a construction site : Stalin's general plan in action. Aleksandr Medvedkin's film New Moscow -- A new cityscape : Stalin's general plan for the reconstruction of Moscow -- Moscow as a construction site : between demolition and new construction -- Moscow beyond the ring roads -- Human landscape, struggle for survival -- A topography of the disappeared : the Moscow directory of 1936. Snapshot of the status quo : directories as documents of their age -- Topography of power and other locations -- Traces of the disappeared -- Lists of people to be shot and the posthumous reconstruction of their addresses -- The creation of enemies : the criminal prosecution of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, 19-24 August 1936. World-historical criminal cases : the rhetoric of the first Moscow show trial -- The echo of violence : how a latent civil war comes to be articulated in language -- 'Double-dealers' -- The birth of the show trial from the spirit of lynch-law -- The ideal enemy -- 'Tired of the effort of observing and understanding' : Lion Feuchtwanger's Moscow 1937. A key scene in European intellectual history : Feuchtwanger's meeting with Stalin -- The impotence of the anti-fascist movement : how to generate a point of view -- The end of the flâneur : journey in the shadow of the NKVD -- The phenomenology of confusion and the creation of unambiguous meaning : credo quia absurdum -- Leave-taking at Belorusskii Station -- In the glare of battle : Spain and other fronts. Moscow maps : the scene is Spain -- A world in meltdown, war scare -- The Soviet nation as a patriotic fighting unit -- Metastases : show trial in Barcelona, the NKVD abroad -- Barcelona transfer : Moscow experiences -- Blindness and terror : the suppressed census of 1937. A journey into the interior of society -- 6 January 1937 : snapshot of an empire -- Ten years after the census of 1926 : balance sheet after the Great Leap Forward -- Self-analysis, self-education, data acquisition -- The shock of the missing millions -- Statistics as crime --

A stage for the horrors of industrialization : the second Moscow show trial in January 1937. 'The business-like atmosphere' -- The language of expert witnesses -- The topography of the Five-Year Plan -- Human sacrifice, nemesis, chorus -- Postscript -- 'A feast in the time of plague' : the Pushkin jubilee of 10 February 1937. The New York Times : 'all Russia was Pushkin-mad today' -- 'Comrade Pushkin' : consecration of a classic -- A feast in the time of plague : coded discourses -- Platitudes of a new culture -- Russian genius and imperial rule -- Public death : Ordzhonikidze's suicide and death rites. The shock : Sergo is dead -- Escape into ritual -- Suicide as a weapon -- A hopeless situation and protest -- Death as a group experience : speaking of death in times of mass murder -- The engine room of the year 1937 : the February-March plenum of the Central Committee. A leadership at its wits' end : the voice of panic -- Testing the limits and exceeding them : the Party indicts Bukharin and Rykov -- The shock : 'universal, free, secret elections' -- Audit report : ungovernability and fear of chaos -- Wreckers at work in the NKVD -- The dissolution of the Party and the creation of a new one -- Setting the machinery in motion -- Moscow in Paris : the USSR pavilion at the International Exhibition of 1937. The exhibition trail : a journey through the map of the Soviet Union -- The theme park of twentieth-century civilization -- Marginal encounters -- Red Square : parade ground and place of execution -- Chopin concert and killing ritual : radio and the creation of the great community. Radiofikatsia : the two faces of progress -- Radio as the background noise of the new age -- The sphere of feelings -- Radio listeners as 'citizens of the world' -- Stalin : the original soundtrack : the direction of the historical moment -- Wreckers at work in the ether -- Soviet art deco : time preserved in stone. The first All-Union Congress of Architects, 16-26 June 1937 -- Moscow as a building site -- Chaos and stress -- The Soviet universe as exhibition -- The creation of a new style during a state of emergency -- Closing speech : Frank Lloyd Wright -- 'Brown bodies, gaily coloured shorts' : sports parade. 'The glorious beauty of young people' -- Fizkul'turnik, fizkul'turnitsa : icons of the new age -- 'Stalin's tribe' : tableaux vivants in Red Square --

Wealth and destruction : the Seventeenth International Geology Congress in Moscow. The emergence of Soviet geologists : science and the dream of an affluent nation -- Pioneers the nation does not need : geologists as enemies of the people -- Vladimir Vernadskii : a patriot without fear -- Excursion to the Moscow-Volga Canal : science and slave labour -- A city by the sea : the opening of the Moscow-Volga Canal. After the White Sea Canal : Stalin's second arterial highway -- A canal as a Gesamtkunstwerk : the aesthetics of a man-made riverscape -- Dmitlag, the Gulag Archipelago at the gates of the capital : the parallel society of the camp zone -- Perekovka/reforging : the laboratory of the new man -- 'I have seen a country that has been transformed into one great camp' -- Year of adventures, 1937 : a Soviet Icarus. Triumphs, records : a city in a fever -- Non-stop to America -- The conquest of the Arctic -- Twentieth-century adventures -- Heroes of the age : Stalin's aviators -- 'There are thousands of dreamers like me' -- 'Bolshevik romanticism' and terror -- Moscow as shop-windows : the abundance of the world, hungry for goods and dizzy with hunger. André Gide : on luxury and shortages -- Advertisements, window displays : objects of desire and how to present them -- Dizzy with hunger -- A hopeless struggle : a nation of speculators -- The queue as grapevine -- Open spaces, dream landscapes : cruising on the Volga, holidaying on the Red Riviera, conspiracies in the Dachas -- The national Bolshevik Nikolai Ustrialov : his return home and death. Returning home from exile : establishing contact with the new Russia -- national Bolshevism and Stalin's 'socialism in one country' -- The world of 'former people' and 1937 -- A double reading : a diary with comments by the NKVD -- Celebrating the October revolution on 7 November 1937. In the diplomats' box -- Conversations in the inner circle of power -- a miniature of high society before the massacre. The bombs come closer -- Beau monde, illustrious society -- Masked ball at the American Embassy -- Interior with piano and nursemaid -- Yezhov's salon : art and the secret police -- Postscript : inventory of luxury and fashion -- Soviet Hollywood : miracles and monsters. Lenin in October : the Revolution corrected -- The USSR as a land of film, picture palaces and stars -- Mosfilm 1937 : chaos in the film factory -- Volga-Volga : directors as conspirators, actors as spies -- Terror and good entertainment --

Death in exile. Dimitrov's diary : a record of self-destruction

Vanishing point Moscow : biotope

Foreign comrades

Vulnerability : world communism as world conspiracy

Lists, dossiers and card indexes

Arcadia in Moscow : Stalin's Luna Park. 'A centre of culture and rest'

'What a summer!'

The locus of public opinion

'Avtozavodtsy' : the workforce of the Stalin car factories. 'Shanghai' : city of immigrants, city on the periphery

Ivan Likhachev, captain of industry

Factory patriotism : the factory as melting pot

'Mass criticism', or the orchestration of hatred and despair

Dzhaz : the sound of the thirties. Dzhaz (Utesov)

Songs for the masses (Dunaevskii)

Classical music (Shostakovich)

Changing faces, changing times

America, America : the other new world. Ili'a Il'f and Evgenii Petrov's journey to America

Special relations : Soviet Americanism and the New Deal

The American way of life in 1937

Utopia as present-day reality

'I know of no other country...' : 1937 and the production of Soviet space. The birth of the Soviet Union from the spirit of songs for the masses

Moscow as an image-making machine

Homogenizing labour : purges and the unity of the Soviet nation

The Butovo shooting range : topography of the great terror. Looking for traces : the archaeology of the graveyard

Mass murder on the outskirts of the city

Sociology of the mass grave

Killing by quota : Order No. 00447

World war, civil war

Lonely white sail... : dreamtime, children's worlds

Yezhov at the Bolshoi Theatre : celebrating twenty years of the Cheka. At the heart of Moscow : power made visible

Celebratory speeches and music between the mass murders

Ovations for the executioners : morituri salutant

Bukharin takes his leave. Bukharin's final plea

The show trial : exercises in dialectics

The Lubianka : prison as a production site

Letter to Koba

A Moscow childhood in 1900

'For official use only' : Moscow as a city on the enemy map

The foundation pit. The imaginary centre : a support for the empire

The dome that disappeared : Russian Byzantium

Labouring away at a vacuum : fantasies of the building of the century

Rome, New York, Moscow : the genius of Boris Iofan

War, post-war, and the end of the state of emergency

Instead of an epilogue.