Category Archives: Academia

co-written with Maya Haber Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin, Cornell University Press, 2009.

Studies of the Soviet gulag encompass a cottage industry of its own in Russian historiography.  Since 1991, a torrent of studies have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy.  Few, however, have delved into how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over 4 million prisoners from labor camps and colonies to society between 1953 and 1958.  It is for this reason that Miriam Dobson‘s Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin is a welcomed and refreshing edition to so-called “Gulag Studies.”

In it we don’t find the heroic gulag returnee (“Khrushchev’s zeks,” as Stephen Cohen affectionately calls them), who was unjustly persecuted under Stalin for his political views, but more a tragic figure whose finds himself indelibly marked by his years ..read more

Two weeks ago, I did a post on 75 years since the Kirov law.  I was happy to find that the New Times published an interview with Matthew Lenoe whose forthcoming book, Kirov’s Murder and Soviet History, is a hefty reexamination of the famous assassination.  Below is a translation I did of the interview.

*****

“Stalin used Kirov’s murder as justification for mass executions”

by Evgeniia Albats

Seventy-five years ago, on Dec. 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee, VKP(b), was killed by a shot to the back of the head. The bloody bacchanalia known in history as the Great Terror followed. Violence became the means to rule an huge country. Show trials of then leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Rykov, who were all accused of the murder, became the symbol of Stalinist justice.  Millions of people, including almost all of the Society of Political Prisoners ..read more

Today, I began research on Komsomol participation in collectivization and found this little tidbit in the archive.  This is from Komsomol Central Committee member Gerasimov’s report, October 1929:

In Penzen region, there were rumors that a [grain requisitioning] commission arrived to close the church.  Or in a similar rumor, the commission arrived to arrest the priest and take him away.  A crowd gathered.  Or another case, to catch a swindler.  A crowd of up to 800 people surrounded the commission and began shouting.  They wanted to arrange a samosud.  There were shouts of “They attack the peasantry from all sides, let’s beat them all.”  True, more than half of [the crowd] was drunk.

RGASPI f. 1M, op.5, d. 24a, l. 22

Yesterday, December 1, was 75 years since the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Party Organization, and Stalin ally.  It was on the night of December 1, 1934 that a certain Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled party worker, shot Kirov in the secretary’s third floor office. Nikolaev was immediately caught and interrogated under Stalin’s personal supervision.  He was executed shortly thereafter.

Rumors have been circling for years as to what Nikolaev’s motives were.  Some have suggest that Kirov was having an affair with Nikolaev’s wife.  Others have suggested that he had a personal or work beef with Kirov.  These questions remain mostly unanswered.  Partly it is because they are unanswerable. But also because the majority of historians believe that Nikolaev did not act alone.  For them, Stalin was the main culprit and wanted to get rid of Kirov because of his popularity.  Since Kirov has been held up ..read more

It has been a long haul and I’m slowly crawling out of my hole.

For those who don’t already know, I filed my dissertation, We Shall Refashion Life on Earth! The Political Culture of the Communist Youth League, 1918-1928, on Monday.  The process of filing was a bureaucratic nightmare in and of itself.  Back and forth between UCLA’s Murphy Hall because my middle name, “Christopher” (which I never use, but I somehow put down when I registered at UCLA), was not on the the dissertation. Then two trips to the library to get it checked over by the dissertation lady.  What a thankless job that must be!  A quite unpleasant, though somewhat charming, woman sits in a small office surrounded by dissertations, goes through each and every page to make sure the margins and typeface are correct.  I was told she busts out a ruler but this must be an urban ..read more

Lewis Siegelbaum has a cover interview with Rorotoko for his recent book Cars for Comrades.  I didn’t know about this interview until I received an email from Cornell University Press’ Publicity Manager.  I should note, however, posting a blurb about Siegelbaum’s interview isn’t purely out of disinterest.  He’s on my dissertation committee and bringing attention to his book is the least I can do to thank him for his quick and gracious reading.  Plus Cars for Comrades is a book worth mentioning regardless of my relationship with him.  For car lovers it tells a story virtually unknown in the West.  For lovers of Russian history, it adds to our knowledge of Soviet culture and consumerism through something we in the United States take completely for granted: the car.

Cars for Comrades also provides some historical context to accompany all the recent articles decrying the state of Russia’s roads and how Russia ..read more