March 14, 2024
Marci Shore— The Sky Turns Black from Smoke Close to midnight on Tuesday, 18 February 2014, twenty-one-year-old Misha Martynenko, reeking of smoke, returned to the Kiev apartment he shared with… READ MORE
August 12, 2020
Alexandra Popoff— Vasily Grossman began Life and Fate, a powerful anti-totalitarian novel, when Stalin was still alive. Back then he had no prospect of publication. But after the dictator’s death,… READ MORE
July 24, 2020
Evgeny Dobrenko— In Russia everything changes over ten years and nothing changes over two hundred years. These words, attributed to Petr Stolypin, were borne out, it seems, by all of… READ MORE
February 27, 2019
David Reynolds— For nearly four years, and against all the odds, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin led the most effective alliance in history. Yet they met face-to-face only twice…. READ MORE
October 16, 2017
Oleg V. Khlevniuk; Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov— Over his seventy-four-year life, the Soviet dictator fought through a stormy historical landscape to become an important factor in events not only… READ MORE
May 5, 2017
Golfo Alexopoulos— In the Gulag or forced labor camp system under Stalin, 1929-1953, prisoners represented the state’s “human raw material.” Camp officials recorded prisoners’ illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths as a… READ MORE
December 21, 2016
James Heinzen— I first became fascinated with the social and cultural dimensions of everyday bribery in the Soviet Union when I was robbed in Moscow in 1992, just after the collapse… READ MORE
The Elusive Archive
