Everyday life and terror – 1937

What often gets overlooked in the examination of the great terror (and other 20th Century terrors) is the experience of ordinary people and their thoughts, fears and survival strategies. During the Cold War an immense amount of scholarship went into fathoming the internal workings of the soviet state and the reasoning of Stalin and his inner circle. Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has done an immense amount of work and scholarship into discerning the experience of the everyday. This week I look at her brilliant book Everyday Stalinism to explore the Great Terror of 1937-38: