Overview

Witnessing Stalin’s Justice brings together contemporary American reactions to the Moscow show trials and analyses them to understand their impact on US-Soviet relations. Held between 1936 and 1938, the show trials made false charges such as espionage, sabotage and counter-revolutionary plotting at the behest of the exiled Leon Trotsky to condemn the veteran Party leaders who had founded the Communist Party and led the Russian Revolution. Using eyewitness accounts by American diplomats and foreign correspondents for the American press as well as official US government sources, this book highlights the wildly different reactions seen from liberals, radicals, intellectuals and mainstream media. Evans and Welch show how fractures of opinion ran through every level of US society and divided political groups, especially between the American Communist party and other left-wing organisations. Covering the closed trials of the Soviet military, the Soviet anti-foreigner campaign and the Dewey Commission as well as the show trials themselves, Witnessing Stalin’s Justice uncovers and brings together American reactions to the Soviet Union’s Great Purge.

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9781350338319

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Reviews

This nine-chapter volume, by Kelly J. Evans and Jeanie M. Welch, focuses on “an overlooked aspect of standard works on ... contemporaneous American reactions to the purges and the show trials” (p. 2). Given how many English-language studies have addressed these topics, filling this striking gap is long overdue and welcome. Evans and Welch extensively mined relevant US State Department documents and articles from numerous US newspapers and journals, ranging from mainstream to radical to anti-Communist. The seventy-eight pages of footnotes are also a researcher’s delight. The book is a valuable contribution and provides a clear road map for interested researchers. -- William Chase, University of Pittsburgh * H-Russia *

Author Information

Kelly J. Evans is Associate Professor and Reference Librarian at Eastern Washington University, USA. Jeanie M. Welch is a former Professor and Reference Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA, and former Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. She is the author of two monographs.

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