In May 1934 the USSR post­ed two journalist/​spies in key over­seas slots. Vladimir Romm, scion of the famous Romm Jew­ish print­ing house of Vil­na, became Izves­ti­a’s inau­gur­al cor­re­spon­dent to Wash­ing­ton. Dmit­ry Bukhart­sev, a fel­low native of the Pale of Set­tle­ment, was assigned as cor­re­spon­dent to Berlin. Two years lat­er both were recalled under pre­text, thrown into the dread­ed Lubyan­ka prison and forced to give false tes­ti­mo­ny at the noto­ri­ous 1937 Moscow show tri­al, one of three staged to jus­ti­fy the liq­ui­da­tion of scores of Par­ty mem­bers whom Stal­in did­n’t trust. Draw­ing from for­eign and domes­tic archives, inter­views with descen­dants and a wealth of sec­ondary sources, Stal­in’s Wit­ness­es tracks Romm, Bukhart­sev and three oth­er ​“wit­ness­es” from the late Czarist era to the eve of World War II, giv­ing them fic­tion­al voic­es to help explain how their paths came to inter­sect in a Sovi­et court­room some three-quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry ago. And most impor­tant­ly, why.