V. Grossman’s appeal to the People’s Commissioner of Internal Affairs of the USSR

Abstract

The article deals with the arrest and imprisonment of the literary scholar Victor Grossman. L. Solodukhina cites and comments hitherto unpublished documents, such as Grossman’s appeal to re-examine his case and his interrogation transcripts. He was arrested by NKVD in the night of 9 March 1938, on the charges of being a member of ‘the terrorist organization of Social-Revolutionaries (SR) and Menshiviks formed at the Moscow College of Defence Counsels.’ As grounds for his arrest, the authorities referred to his membership, as a 17-year-old, in a revolutionary SR society in Batum and Odessa in 1905, as well as his brief career as an SR politician (from March to August of 1917), which ended with his election to the Moscow City Duma (Parliament) in the same year. Following his arrest, and despite the absence of any proof of involvement with the terrorist organization, Grossman was sentenced to 8 years in a prison camp. Released in 1946, he was arrested again in 1948. The publication is supplied with a detailed account of the reasons behind Grossman’s first and second detentions and his everyday life in the camp. The article also reconstructs the context of Grossman’s life defined by the respective historical period.