Molotov opened the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) on 10 March 1939 with a piece of arithmetic. "Comrades, 1,574 delegates with vote have been elected to the Congress, of whom 1,567 are present." Then the applause, and the declaration that the congress was open.
Five years and one month earlier the Seventeenth Congress had met in the same hall and called itself the Congress of Victors. Of its 1,966 delegates, Khrushchev told the Twentieth Congress in 1956, 1,108 were arrested on counter-revolutionary charges; of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee it elected, 98 were shot.
This volume is the record of what the survivors said to each other. Issued in English in Moscow in the same year as the Short Course, it gathers the reports and speeches of the first congress of the party that came out the other side of the Terror - the Third Five-Year Plan, the international situation on the eve of war, the doctrine of the state under socialism - delivered by men who had watched most of the previous congress disappear.
As a primary source it is close to unique. Stenographic congress records of this period are scarce in English, and this one covers the precise moment when the purge was declared over and its results were being written up as achievements. It should be read for what the speakers say, for the order in which they say it, and for the shape of what they do not.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
