Stalin’s Iron Fist
I usually don’t cheerlead the work my adviser and friend, J. Arch Getty, but if you have any interest in his new book Stalin’s Iron Fist, read Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s review in the Telegraph. If you’re not familiar Getty’s work, over the last two decades he has single handedly rewritten the history of the Terror as we know it. In Stalin’s Iron Fist, he explores the meteoric rise of the modest, hardworking Nikolai Ezhov from a worker in the famed Putilov factory to the head of the NKVD. In many ways, Ezhov’s rise and fall is an archetype of the inner dichotomies of the Stalinist new man: he was a benefiary, shaper, power player, perpetrator, and victim of the very system that created him.
But I’m hardly an impartial critic of Getty’s work, so instead I’ll let Montefiore sing its praises:
J. Arch Getty, an American professor, and Oleg Naumov, ..read more
