The State Against itself: Socialist Tensions and Political Conflict in the U.S.S.R. 1936-1938

Abstract The primary concern of the present study is to analyze the internal conflicts within the Soviet ruling strata during the “great trials” of 1936-1938. By and large, historians have paid only scant attention to social and political conflicts during this crucial period in Soviet society, when they have not simply ignored them altogether. This is often due to a certain assumption concerning the nature of Soviet society. For the latter tends to be seen as a monolithic block in which nothing can move, dominated as it is by a bureacratic apparatus whose empire extends without exception over all activities — an apparatus that in turn was dominated for a long time by the will of a single individual, Stalin.