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!"
Wachtel, Julius: - Julius Wachtel, the son of Holocaust survivors, was born in Italy, where his Eastern European Jewish parents resettled following their liberation from the Nazi regime. The family soon left for Argentina. Ten years later they emigrated to the U.S. Julius served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, earned an undergraduate degree in policing and embarked on a Federal law enforcement career. He completed a master's degree in criminal justice at Arizona State University and in 1982 took a break in service to earn a Ph.D. in criminal justice at the State University of New York at Albany. But Julius had another interest. His mother was freed from a concentration camp by Soviet troops, and throughout his adult life he indulged his curiosity about the fearsome "Reds" by devouring Russian literature. The works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn led to an interest in the Soviet period, and especially in the abuses of Stalin's regime. Following his retirement from the Federal government Julius began a second career as a lecturer in criminal justice at California State University Fullerton. He developed and taught a course on Soviet justice that includes a staged reenactment of the Moscow show trials. Julius also participated in a visiting scholar program at the Law Academy of Ukraine. These experiences helped set him on the decade-long project that became Stalin's Witnesses. He retired from this position in January 2018. Julius and his wife reside in Garden Grove, California. Their daughter, an NYU grad, resides in Brooklyn.
