On December 4, 1926, Walter Benjamin traveled to Moscow. The diary of his stay from December 6, 1926, to February 1, 1927, was written at a time when Stalin was not only eliminating Trotsky and the opposition in the struggle for Lenin's succession but was also putting an end to the revolutionary Russian art and its experimental innovations in theater and literature. Benjamin still meets with important representatives of this revolutionary aesthetic. The contacts with official bodies are not very successful: Benjamin's exposé on the Goethe article, written for the new Great Soviet Encyclopedia, is rejected. More than just a cultural-political kaleidoscope and more than a physiognomic representation of the city of Moscow, Benjamin's diary is an outstanding personal document - "perhaps the most ruthless and candid," as Scholem describes it.