Creating the enemy

The book examines interpersonal relationships and behavioral patterns in the years 1937 to 1938 in the Soviet Union, the period of the Great Terror. Using the fates of individual employees of three large Moscow factories, the author shows how mass operations (arrests of certain groups of the population) and calls by Communist Party leaders to expose " hidden enemies" set in motion the dynamics of terror, from whose destructive power no one was ultimately safe. < br> The flood of denunciations and the hunt for " masked saboteurs" turned the ordinary work environment into a trap that anyone could fall into. Regardless of evidence or loyalty to the party. Accusations based on social ties then expanded the number of victims to include family members, co-workers, and acquaintances. < br> The author does not question the responsibility of political elites led by J. IN. Stalin, but at the same time it shows that " ordinary people" were not only victims of terror. Jealousy between individual workers, personal conflicts and defensive strategies, such as preventive denunciations, on the contrary, helped to set the wheels of terror in motion and for a certain period made it impossible to find any way out of it. Through the stories of specific people, Goldman convincingly argues against the totalitarian concept – still popular in the Czech environment – dividing the society of the Stalinist (or generally communist) dictatorship into the active rulers and the passive ruled. < br>