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  1. Home
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  3. Inventing the Enemy
  • Cited by 24
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2011
Online ISBN:
9780511994906
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511994906
Subjects:
Area Studies, History, European Studies, Russian and East European History
Information

Book description

Inventing the Enemy uses stories of personal relationships to explore the behaviour of ordinary people during Stalin's terror. Communist Party leaders strongly encouraged ordinary citizens and party members to 'unmask the hidden enemy' and people responded by flooding the secret police and local authorities with accusations. By 1937, every workplace was convulsed by hyper-vigilance, intense suspicion and the hunt for hidden enemies. Spouses, co-workers, friends and relatives disavowed and denounced each other. People confronted hideous dilemmas. Forced to lie to protect loved ones, they struggled to reconcile political imperatives and personal loyalties. Workplaces were turned into snake pits. The strategies that people used to protect themselves - naming names, pre-emptive denunciations, and shifting blame - all helped to spread the terror. Inventing the Enemy, a history of the terror in five Moscow factories, explores personal relationships and individual behaviour within a pervasive political culture of 'enemy hunting'.

Reviews

'… essential reading for understanding crucial questions about different levels of responsibility during the Great Terror and how it was not only the Soviet elite, but groups of ordinary people, who actively engaged in their own destruction.'

Peter Whitewood Source: Slavonic and East European Review

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