“This is a book about ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary event. In a masterful summary of the Terror and writings about it, which will be useful to specialists and nonspecialists alike, Wendy Goldman takes us into the factories to hear the voices of the people who worked there. These are not Stalins or Molotovs; they are Ivans and Petyas and Katyas who, despite being plain people, were anything but simple. Goldman shows us how they lived multifaceted lives as workers, activists, family members, lovers, defenders and betrayers, victims and perpetrators all at the same time. She introduces us to the nuances of their language and their silences, their belief in the state and their fear of it. Goldman’s human microhistory gives much needed color and texture to a tragedy often described through dry documents and is essential to understanding the terror as a whole.” – Arch Getty, University of California, Los Angeles

“Wendy Goldman’s Inventing the Enemy describes how the Terror developed within the local grassroots Communist Party organizations of five Moscow industrial enterprises, some of the USSR’s most important factories. She carefully reconstructs how individuals, loyal Party workers and activists, became sucked into a vortex of accusation and counteraccusation, concealment and betrayal, belief and doubt. The lines between victims and perpetrators became completely blurred, not just because of the well-documented practice of self-protection, denouncing others before you became denounced yourself, but because the Bolshevik Revolution and the rapid and dramatic social changes brought about by Stalinist industrialization left no one with a ‘pure’ Bolshevik (or Stalinist) pedigree. The most loyal Stalinists had family and political ties to individuals and groups singled out for repression and elimination by the Terror, ties that left everyone vulnerable. Goldman’s characters come vividly to life, almost as if they were characters in a novel. But this is no piece of fiction. It is a tale that is grimly true, and it forces all of us to think how we might have behaved had we been there.” – Donald Filtzer, University of East London

“Mining a rich new seam of archival sources, Wendy Goldman has written a fascinating study of the Terror’s impact on ordinary people. By following individual stories, she shows how Soviet citizens were both agents and victims of the purges, caught up in a tragic logic; hers is a ‘history without heroes.’ Written in a clear and accessible style, Goldman’s book is essential reading for anybody seeking to understand Soviet society during the repressions.” – David Priestland, University of Oxford