Vytváření nepřítele - Udávání a zastrašování ve stalinském Rusku – Goldman Wendy Z. (2015)

This Czech-language book examines interpersonal relationships and patterns of behaviour in the Soviet Union in 1937 and 1938, during the period of the Great Terror. Through the fates of individual employees at three large Moscow factories, the author shows how mass operations involving the arrest of particular groups of people, together with Communist Party leaders’ calls to expose “hidden enemies,” set the dynamics of terror in motion. Ultimately, no one was safe from its destructive force. Floods of denunciations and hunts for “disguised saboteurs” turned ordinary workplaces into traps in which anyone could be caught, regardless of evidence or loyalty to the party. Accusations based on social connections extended the circle of those affected to family members, colleagues and acquaintances. While the author does not question the responsibility of the political elites led by J. V. Stalin, she also shows that “ordinary people” were not merely victims of terror. Rivalry between workers, personal conflicts and defensive strategies such as pre-emptive denunciations helped drive the machinery of terror and, for a time, made it impossible to find any way out. Through the stories of specific individuals, Goldman convincingly challenges the totalitarian interpretation, still popular in the Czech context, that divides society under Stalinist, or more generally Communist, dictatorship into active rulers and passive ruled.