1937 is a year of terrible paradoxes for the city of Moscow: the fabulous urban development of the city, which materializes in the construction of the new metro, the Moscow Canal, skyscrapers and cultural effervescence, coexists with the death of a million and a half of people, the lack of privacy, the denunciation and the false judgments, which plunged the citizens into what has been called the «Great Terror». In this absorbing essay, Schlögel takes us from a bird's eye view to a time when the border between dream and nightmare disappeared in the interest of building a new society. A monumental and rigorous work that narrates one of the most dramatic and disturbing episodes in recent history.

“Until now, there was no book in the West that had contributed so much to the recovery of the memory of Stalin's victims. An extraordinary work from the point of view of research, storytelling and memory.
The Times Literary Supplement