Discusses Irina Nikolaevna Il’ina, Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-e gody [Civil Organizations in Russia in the 1920s], in Kritika 3, 1 (Winter 2002): 173-81; discussed by later works on “obshchestvennost'”

Discusses works on partisans, including:

Cerovic, Masha. Les Enfants de Staline: La guerre des partisans soviétiques
(1941–1944). L’Univers historique. Paris: Le Seuil, 2018. 366 pp. €25.00.
ISBN 978-2-0211-2167-4.

Kudriashov, S. V., ed. Partizanskoe dvizhenie v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi
voiny. Vestnik Arkhiva Prezidenta Rossii…[Read more]

Critical review essay on Slezkine’s “House of Government,” its millenarian thesis, and the emergent genre of academic blockbuster to which it belongs.

This article argues that the framework of the revolutionary life cycle can become a richly interpretive lens for Russian/Soviet historians of the entire late imperial and Soviet periods. The first section critically reviews the history of the approach and its recent revival in the field of comparative revolutions, focusing on the frequently flawed…[Read more]

Russian translation of “Russian-Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled?” published in NLO

NLO discussion: David-Fox’s response to the commentaries on “Russian-Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled?” [in Russian] by 11 anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and historians (Timur Atnashev, Andy Byford, Alexander Etkind, Bruce Grant, Catriona Kelly, Ilya Kalinin, Kirill Kobrin, Stephen Lovell, Ale…[Read more]

first para: When Kritika published a special issue in 2001 on the state of the field ten
years after the end of communism, it was logical to include a reassessment of
the October Revolution and two pieces on the rapidly developing investigation
of the Stalin period. Transnational history went unmentioned, along with
international and…[Read more]

Orig. English version of NLO article translated and published in Russian translation as: “Modernost’ v Rossii i SSSR: otsutstvuiushchaia, obshchaia, al’ternativnaia, perepletennaia?”)

first para: Grappling with the relationship between intellectuals and communism
after 1917 calls to mind two topics long treated as almost entirely distinct.
The first concerns non-Soviet, generally noncommunist intellectuals
around the world and, in particular, intense twentieth-century debates
over the pro-Soviet “fellow travelers” in the…[Read more]

First para: Do new biographies of the dictator provoke deeper analysis of the Soviet
system? Will the life of Stalin open up new ways of understanding Stalinism?
Past experience, it has to be said, raises doubts. Of all the biographies of Stalin,
few have integrated, much less altered, the state of the art in Soviet history.1
The main reason…[Read more]

First para: The German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941 brought with it the most
extreme conditions of the short twentieth century. Suddenly, the existence of
the Soviet state was no longer assured. What the regime did in response tells
us much about Stalinism and the Soviet order. In an enormous swathe of territory
from the western and…[Read more]