Stalin's Witnesses: A Novel of the Great Terror and the Moscow Show Trials

http://www.stalinswitnesses.comIn November 1936 Vladimir Romm, the USSR’s celebrated correspondent to Washington, was recalled to Moscow and thrown into the dungeons of the infamous Lubyanka prison. He and four other “witnesses” would soon take the stand at the second of the three Moscow Show Trials, the most notorious events of their kind in modern history. Their testimony, given before diplomats and correspondents from around the world, would corroborate the equally false confessions of dozens of influential Communists, consigning witnesses and defendants alike to the executioner and leaving a chronically suspicious Stalin the undisputed leader of the Soviet state.Based on extensive research in North American, European, and Russian archives, interviews with descendants, and secondary sources, Stalin’s Witnesses is a fictionalized yet historically faithful account of how the lives of four Soviet citizens and a German expatriate intersected in a Moscow courtroom three-quarters of a century ago. We perch on Romm's shoulders as he agitates for socialism, navigates the treacherous shoals of the revolution, serves as a Soviet correspondent/spy in Japan and Europe, and, once the USSR and America establish diplomatic relations, assumes his post in America’s capital. With his career at its zenith, Romm is abruptly recalled to Moscow and becomes another victim of Stalin’s paranoia. A fictional but deeply fact-based prison diary conveys how the regime’s vicious prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, crafted a scenario so persuasive that it convinced Western leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that leading Party members had conspired to topple Stalin and abandon their beloved country to Germany and Japan.As a guide for students of the era, the novel includes a detailed author’s notes section with references to source materials. In this expanded edition, a Prequel takes readers to the turbulent times preceding the Russian Revolution, and to the famous Eastern European publishing family that gave Romm his name.