Navigation : Margarita's flight. Margarita's flight ; Manuscripts don't burn : a writer in 1937 ; Relief map of the city, locations, staging posts ; Dramatis personae and their portrayal : dual characters ; NKVD, the organization ; "People vanished from their apartments without trace" ; Sudden deaths, execution as spectacle ; "It can't be!"
Moscow as a construction site : Stalin's general plan in action. Aleksandr Medvedkin's film New Moscow ; A new cityscape : Stalin's General plan for the reconstruction of Moscow ; Moscow as a construction site : between demolition and new construction ; Moscow beyond the ring roads ; Human landscape, struggle for survival
A topography of the disappeared : the Moscow directory of 1936. Snapshot of the status quo : directories as documents of their age ; Topography of power and other locations ; Traces of the disappeared ; Lists of people to be shot and the posthumous reconstruction of their addresses
The creation of enemies : the criminal prosecution of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, 19-24 August 1936. World-historical criminal cases : the rhetoric of the first Moscow show trial ; The echo of violence : how a latent civil war comes to be articulated in language ; "Double-dealers" ; The birth of the show trial from the spirit of lynch-law ; The ideal enemy
"Tired of the effort of observing and understanding" : Lion Feuchtwanger's Moscow 1937. A key scene in European intellectual history : Feuchtwanger's meeting with Stalin ; The impotence of the anti-fascist movement : how to generate a point of view ; The end of the flâneur : journey in the shadow of the NKVD ; The phenomenology of confusion and the creation of unambiguous meaning : credo quia absurdum ; Leave-taking at Belorusskii Station
In the glare of battle : Spain and other fronts. Moscow maps : the scene is Spain ; A world in meltdown, war scare ; The Soviet nation as a patriotic fighting unit ; Metastases : show trial in Barcelona, the NKVD abroad ; Barcelona transfer : Moscow experiences
Blindness and terror : the suppressed census of 1937. A journey into the interior of society ; 6 January 1937 : snapshot of an empire ; Ten years after the census of 1926 : balance sheet after the Great Leap Forward ; Self-analysis, self-education, data acquisition ; The shock of the missing millions ; Statistics as crime.
A stage for the horrors of industrialization : the second Moscow show trial in January 1937. "The business-like atmosphere" ; The language of expert witnesses ; The topography of the Five-Year Plan ; Human sacrifice, nemesis, chorus ; Postscript
"A feast in the time of plague" : the Pushkin jubilee of 10 February 1937. The New York Times : "All Russia was Pushkin-mad today" ; "Comrade Pushkin" : consecration of a classic ; A feast in the time of plague : coded discourses ; Platitudes of a new culture ; Russian genius and imperial rule
Public death : Ordzhonikidze's suicide and death rites. The shock : Sergo is dead ; Escape into ritual ; Suicide as a weapon ; A hopeless situation and protest ; Death as a group experience : speaking of death in times of mass murder
The engine room of the year 1937 : the February-March plenum of the Central Committee. A leadership at its wits' end : the voice of panic ; Testing the limits and exceeding them : the Party indicts Bukharin and Rykov ; The shock : "universal, free, secret elections" ; Audit report : ungovernability and fear of chaos ; Wreckers at work in the NKVD ; The dissolution of the Party and the creation of a new one ; Setting the machinery in motion
Moscow in Paris : the USSR pavilion at the International Exhibition of 1937. The exhibition trail : a journey through the map of the Soviet Union ; The theme park of twentieth-century civilization ; Marginal encounters
Red Square : parade ground and place of execution
Chopin concert and killing ritual : radio and the creation of the great community. Radiofikatsia : the two faces of progress ; Radio as the background noise of the new age ; The sphere of feelings ; Radio listeners as "citizens of the world" ; Stalin : the original soundtrack : the direction of the historical moment ; Wreckers at work in the ether
Soviet art deco : time preserved in stone. The first All-Union Congress of Architects, 16-26 June 1937 ; Moscow as a building site ; Chaos and stress ; The Soviet universe as exhibition ; The creation of a new style during a state of emergency ; Closing speech : Frank Lloyd Wright
"Brown bodies, gaily coloured shorts" : sports parade. "The glorious beauty of young people" ; Fizkul'turnik, fizkul'turnitsa : icons of the new age ; "Stalin's tribe" : tableaux vivants in Red Square.
Wealth and destruction : the Seventeenth International Geology Congress in Moscow. The emergence of Soviet geologists : science and the dream of an affluent nation ; Pioneers the nation does not need : geologists as enemies of the people ; Vladimir Vernadskii : a patriot without fear ; Excursion to the Moscow-Volga Canal : science and slave labour
A city by the sea : the opening of the Moscow-Volga Canal. After the White Sea Canal : Stalin's second arterial highway ; A canal as a Gesamtkunstwerk : the aesthetics of a man-made riverscape ; Dmitlag, the Gulag Archipelago at the gates of the capital : the parallel society of the camp zone ; Perekovka/reforging : the laboratory of the new man ; "I have seen a country that has been transformed into one great camp"
Year of adventures, 1937 : a Soviet Icarus. Triumphs, records : a city in a fever ; Non-stop to America ; The conquest of the Arctic ; Twentieth-century adventures ; Heroes of the age : Stalin's aviators ; "There are thousands of dreamers like me" ; "Bolshevik romanticism" and terror
Moscow as shop-window : the abundance of the world, hungry for goods and dizzy with hunger. André Gide : on luxury and shortages ; Advertisements, window displays : objects of desire and how to present them ; Dizzy with hunger ; A hopeless struggle : a nation of speculators ; The queue as grapevine
Open spaces, dream landscapes : cruising on the Volga, holidaying on the Red Riviera, conspiracies in the Dachas
The national Bolshevik Nikolai Ustrialov : his return home and death. Returning home from exile : establishing contact with the new Russia ; National Bolshevism and Stalin's "Socialism in one country" ; The world of "former people" and 1937 ; A double reading : a diary with comments by the NKVD
Celebrating the October revolution on 7 November 1937. In the diplomats' box ; Conversations in the inner circle of power
A miniature of high society before the massacre. The bombs come closer ; Beau monde, illustrious society ; Masked ball at the American Embassy ; Interior with piano and nursemaid ; Yezhov's salon : art and the secret police ; Postscript : inventory of luxury and fashion
Soviet Hollywood : miracles and monsters. Lenin in October : the Revolution corrected ; The USSR as a land of film, picture palaces and stars ; Mosfilm 1937 : chaos in the film factory ; Volga-Volga : directors as conspirators, actors as spies ; Terror and good entertainment.
Death in exile. Dimitrov's diary : a record of self-destruction ; Vanishing point Moscow : biotope ; Foreign comrades ; Vulnerability : world communism as world conspiracy ; Lists, dossiers and card indexes
Arcadia in Moscow : Stalin's Luna Park. "A centre of culture and rest" ; "What a summer!" ; The locus of public opinion
"Avtozavodtsy" : the workforce of the Stalin car factories. "Shanghai" : city of immigrants, city on the periphery ; Ivan Likhachev, captain of industry ; Factory patriotism : the factory as melting pot ; "Mass criticism", or the orchestration of hatred and despair
Dzhaz : the sound of the thirties. Dzhaz (Utesov) ; Songs for the masses (Dunaevskii) ; Classical music (Shostakovich)
Changing faces, changing times
America, America : the other new world. Ili'a Il'f and Evgenii Petrov's journey to America ; Special relations : Soviet Americanism and the New Deal ; The American way of life in 1937 ; Utopia as present-day reality
"I know of no other country ..." : 1937 and the production of Soviet space. The birth of the Soviet Union from the spirit of songs for the masses ; Moscow as an image-making machine ; Homogenizing labour : purges and the unity of the Soviet nation
The Butovo shooting range : topography of the great terror. Looking for traces : the archaeology of the graveyard ; Mass murder on the outskirts of the city ; Sociology of the mass grave ; Killing by quota : Order No. 00447 ; World war, civil war
Lonely white sail ... : dreamtime, children's worlds
Yezhov at the Bolshoi Theatre : celebrating twenty years of the Cheka. At the heart of Moscow : power made visible ; Celebratory speeches and music between the mass murders ; Ovations for the executioners : morituri salutant
Bukharin takes his leave. Bukharin's final plea ; The show trial : exercises in dialectics ; The Lubianka : prison as a production site ; Letter to Koba ; A Moscow childhood in 1900
'For official use only' : Moscow as a city on the enemy map
The foundation pit. The imaginary centre : a support for the empire ; The dome that disappeared : Russian Byzantium ; Labouring away at a vacuum : fantasies of the building of the century ; Rome, New York, Moscow : the genius of Boris Iofan ; War, post-war, and the end of the state of emergency
