This is the first major study by a Russian Marxist historian of the most tragic and fateful year in the history of the Soviet Union. With an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet source material, including archival documents released after the fall of the USSR, Vadim Rogovin presents a detailed and penetrating analysis of the causes, impact and consequences of Stalin's purges. He demonstrates that the principal function of the terror was the physical annihilation of the substantial socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime.

"This book was published by Vadim Rogovin in Moscow in the fall of 1992, slightly less than one year after the Soviet Union had been dissolved. It is the first volume of what would become a seven-volume study of the struggle of the Left Opposition, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad, as it fought the Stalinist degeneration of the workers' state established after the October Revolution in 1917. This first volume raises the question: "Was There an Alternative to Stalinism?" It studies the rise of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky in 1923, and ends with the expulsion of Trotsky and his supporters at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927. The succeeding volumes examine the history of the resistance to Stalinism up through Trotsky's assassination in August 1940 and the outbreak of World War II"--