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[A CONGRESS OF VICTIMS] Bound Set of 14 Issues of the Pravda Newspaper Collected for a Delegate of the XVIIth Congress of the Communist Party. Pravda [i.e. Truth] #25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 of 1934

Item #2036

Moscow: 1934. 34,5x27 cm. In contemporary red cloth with gilt lettering on front cover. In good condition. Issues folded in fourth. Front leaf of first issue (#25) torn out but preserved, tear of the rest leaves of this issue; small tears and creases of other issues.


At the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party, 166 delegates crossed Stalin’s name out in the balloting for the new Central Committee. Soon, more than half of the attendees were executed, and the gathering went down in history as the Congress of Victims.
The most notorious meeting of Soviet politicians, the 17th Congress, was held from January 26 to February 10, 1934, and hosted 1,966 delegates in total. At the meeting, the delegates summarized the results of the first plan and approved the second 5-year plan for 1933-1937. 
At the Congress, the delegates also elected members of the Central Committee and other organs. In 1960, a member of the counting commission recalled: ‘during the Congress, many delegates deliberated over the General Secretary of the Central Committee… some of us talked to Kirov to get his consent’. Another official added: ‘I don’t remember how many votes were cast against Stalin, but I clearly remember that he received the fewest “for” votes’. The murder of Sergey Kirov (1886-1934), the First Secretary of the Leningrad party organization, became a bellwether of the Great Purge. Over the next four years, political life in the USSR focused on the exposure and suppression of ever-increasing circles of alleged plotters against the regime, all of them linked in one way or another with the Kirov case.
Issue #25 of this newspaper came out on the first day of the Congress, and its front page contains a photo montage of delegates listening to Stalin’s speech. Another montage consists of the heads of shock workers and is printed on the verso of the front page. The same issue includes a map of major construction sites of the second five-year plan. The Pravda [i.e. Truth] newspaper published all reports given at the Congress and offered its readers a general chronicle of the meeting. The texts are supplemented by portraits of speakers, including photographs of P. Postyshev, L. Beria, M. Ammosov, M. Khataevich, V. Bliukher, R. Muklevich, et al. 
Soviet people devoted various records to the 17th Congress of the Communist Party. During the gathering, the Soviet high-altitude balloon Osoviakhim 1 performed a fatal record-setting flight. Three crew members failed to bail out and crashed. News of the catastrophe and funeral replaced the congress chronicle and was published on the front page of issue #33. One of the largest photographs depicts Stalin, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich carrying cinerary urns to bury the crash victims at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.



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Price: $1,950.00