Crimes against humanity can't happen unless decent people look the other way. Stalin's murderous repressions were no exception. "Stalin's Witnesses" is a fictionalized yet historically faithful, deeply researched account of how the lives of four Soviet citizens and a German expatriate came to intersect in a Moscow courtroom three-quarters of a century ago. Under arrest but summoned as "witnesses," their false testimony helped justify the liquidation of dozens of top Communists whom Stalin wanted out of the way.
The main protagonist is Vladimir Romm. A descendant of the famous Romm publishing house of Vilna, he participated in the Revolution, became a Soviet spy, and was posted in Europe and Japan under guise of being a journalist. In 1934 Romm was assigned as the USSR's inaugural correspondent to Washington and developed close working relationships with leading American officials. But two years later, perhaps due to his past support for Trotsky, Romm was unexpectedly recalled to Moscow and thrown into the infamous Lubyanka prison. He was soon forced to participate in the Great Moscow Show Trials, the most notorious events of their kind in modern history.
"Stalin's Witnesses" follows Romm through the Revolution and his service in Germany, Japan, France, Geneva and, ultimately, the United States, blending fact and fiction to tease out the struggles of a fundamentally moral man caught up during an extraordinary time.
As the narrative advances other witnesses come into play. Two are of special note. Dmitri Bukhartsev, also a correspondent/spy, is the intelligence officer who turned Martha Dodd, daughter of the American Ambassador to Germany into a Soviet agent. Another, Leonid Tamm, was the brother of physicist Igor Tamm, a Nobel laureate and leader of the team that developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
Authored by Julius Wachtel, Ph.D., a retired university lecturer whose affinity for the subject stems from a shared cultural background, "Stalin's Witnesses" has received glowing reviews from academics. Here is an extract from comments by Peter Solomon, a renowned political scientist and criminologist at the University of Toronto:
"Wachtel's lively fictional account offers a fresh look at the cruelty of Stalin's repression from the vantage point of one of its victims, an honest communist official and spy cast in the role of witness to sabotage at one of the three show trials of the Great Terror. The fascinating life story of Vladimir Romm encapsulates much of the Soviet experience, and the reader's natural sympathy with this attractive figure gives his cruel fate added poignancy. A powerful indictment of Stalinism and a great read besides!"
