Dear subscriber, Twenty-five years ago last month, on September 18, 1998 Vadim Rogovin, Russian Marxist historian, sociologist and author of a monumental six-volume study of the Trotskyist opposition to the rise of the Stalinist regime within the USSR, died of cancer in Moscow at 61.
Having clandestinely found his way to the work of Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition, Rogovin, who was Doctor of Philosophical Sciences and a researcher of social inequality in contemporary Russia at the Russian Academy of Sciences, became convinced that social inequality was the key to understanding Stalinism.
In sharp contrast to virtually all his academic colleagues, Rogovin did not renounce his Marxist convictions during Perestroika and in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. A long period of political isolation came to an end when Rogovin openly declared himself a Trotskyist & adherent of the International Committee of the Fourth International. He then embarked on the intellectual project that would occupy him for the last decade of his life: writing the history of the Left Opposition to Stalinism in the Soviet Union between 1923 and 1940.
Four volumes of his series, "Was There An Alternative?" are available at Mehring Books in English, translated by Frederick S. Choate.
| | | | | Was There an Alternative? 1923–1927. Trotskyism: A Look Back Through the Years
In this first volume of the series on the history of the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1940, Rogovin traces the complex inner-party struggles of 1923–1927, analyzing contemporaneous official documents, speeches and articles, Soviet archival material, memoirs of participants in political life, and documents by members of the Left Opposition that were suppressed in the Soviet Union for many decades.
| | | | | 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror In this major work of original historical research, 1937 provides a detailed and penetrating analysis of the causes and consequences of Stalin's purges.
Rogovin argues that it is impossible to understand these tragic events apart from Stalin's determination to wipe out all vestiges of the socialist opposition to his regime, above all, that associated with Leon Trotsky. | | | | | Stalin's Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR This volume examines the bloodiest period of the Stalinist repression of political opposition in the Soviet Union, debunking the myth that the Great Purges were merely the product of Stalin's paranoia and had no overriding political logic.
Rogovin argues the ferocity of the mass repression was directly proportional to the intensity of resistance to Stalin within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), particularly the opposition inspired by and associated with the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. | | | www.mehring.com | copyright 2023 Mehring Books | | | |
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