Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book is a history of the Soviet tours of European and American intellectuals, writers, bohemians, professionals, and political tourists who saw the “Soviet experiment” in the 1920s and 1930s. It provides a new framework for understanding the relationship between intellectuals and communism and the Soviet reception of foreign visitors, including the leading fellow-travelers who praised Stalin and Stalinism in the interwar period. The work is based on a far-reaching analysis of the declassified archives of agencies charged with crafting the international image of the first socialist society, including VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad). The book brings this story into new focus as one of the great transnational encounters of the twentieth century. As many visitors were profoundly influenced by their Soviet tours, so too was the Soviet system itself: the experiences of building showcases and tutoring outsiders to perceive the future-in-the-making comprise a neglected international dimension to the emergence of Stalinism. Probing entanglements between far-left and far-right ideological extremes, the work pays special attention to the covert interaction between communism and fascism, including Soviet attempts to recruit German “National Bolsheviks” and fascist intellectuals. The unprecedented scope of Soviet efforts to mold foreign, particularly Western public opinion created a new chapter in the history of modern cultural diplomacy. Setting the revolutionary regime's innovations in the context of the entire history of foreign visitors in Russia, the book argues that Soviet mobilization for the international ideological contest directly paved the way for the cultural Cold War.

An examination of the various different expressions of the distinctive German 'myth of the East' that has been such a marked feature of German culture over the last two centuries, influencing German attitudes both to Eastern Europe itself and also to Germans' own sense of identity.

In the period from the end of World War II until his death, Stalin became an increasingly distrustful despot. He habitually picked on and humiliated members of his inner circle, had them guarded around the clock, had their correspondence decoded by secret police, bugged the lines of even his most senior deputies, and even drove several to the point of publicly betraying their spouses in order to prove their allegiance. This book argues that Stalin's behavior was not entirely paranoid and erratic but followed a clear political logic. This book contends that his system of leadership was at once both modern — Stalin vested authority in committees, elevated younger specialists, and made key institutional innovations — and patrimonial-repressive, informal, and based on personal loyalty. Always, Stalin's goal was to make the USSR a global power and, though the country teetered on the edge of violence during this period of acute domestic and international pressure, he succeeded in achieving superpower status and in holding on to power despite his old age and ill health.

When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, Soviet society plunged into an existential crisis. As Jan Plamper has noted, “With the passing of the leader, the force that held their lives together suddenly was no more … ​His cult and its alchemy of power had made him seem larger than life.”...

The most important source for Bernard’s life, besides his own writings, is the so-called Vita Prima (VP), the “First Life,” which has three different authors and a complex history. The first book was written by Bernard’s friend, the abbot and theologian William of Saint-Thierry, and was completed before William’s own death in 1148, five years before Bernard died. We thus have a fairly rare case of a saint’s life, or hagiography, written before the death of the subject. William showed an awareness of his dilemma of describing a life before it was finished, and it remains an open question to

Two movements and one genre are key to the Tradition: romanticism (as its primary conceptual wellspring), realism (romantic or otherwise, as its most prominent artistic tendency), and the novel (as its most prominent literary form—though, as Russians will swiftly remind non-Russians, not the only one by far). Yet all three seem hostile to the basic concept of an artistic tradition, to any sense of continuity, of shared respect for some traditum—unless we understand it in just the right way. Romanticism (with its cult of originality) and the novel (as a genre that can become whatever its practitioners want)

Stalin as a historian hardly surprises; as a legalist perhaps more so. Stalin was a historical materialist who believed in law governed processes operating dialectically. The course of history was determined to the extent that social change and political institutions were founded on economic foundations. To that extent he fit the classic mold of Marxism. However, he embraced a theoretical innovation first introduced by Georgi Plekhanov and adopted by Lenin, that the political superstructure enjoyed a degree of autonomy in its capacity to intervene in the substructure, depending on historical circumstances, thus accelerating the trajectory toward socialism. He followed Lenin’s

This chapter addresses the emotional states induced by the October Revolution and what followed. To get beyond the mystery of the choices made by Stalin in domestic and foreign policy in the 1930s, simple economic calculations of programs to advance socialism as he understood it, or personal insecurities and the desire to hold on to power, or deductions from Marxism–Leninism as it was being formulated are inadequate. The rationalities of development and the self-interest in remaining in power were conceived in a cognitive and emotional environment, an affective disposition, which sutured those ends of political power, and building socialism to the choice of means to achieve them. Rather than structures, environmental conditions, or experience determining motivation for action, it is within the affective disposition that particular meanings are created, and it is on the basis of those understandings that people are propelled to act on their feelings and convictions. The chapter then considers how explanations of the use of violence were embedded in and nourished by the affective disposition of the Russian revolutionary movement, its extraordinary ambitions, and the vulnerabilities that Bolsheviks experienced before and after October 1917.

It is all perfectly clear now. It is a story told before, many times. First came the “totalitarianists,” the Cold Warriors, those who identified the Soviet Union as a repressive, stultifying country whose leaders sought global domination in the name of anti-imperialism and, ultimately, communism. These scholars overwhelmingly situated in political science departments, some with government service in their pasts, got their start during the upsurge of Soviet studies in the 1950s, when first Columbia, then Harvard, then other august institutions lent their prestige to the founding of Russian institutes and the Department of Defense (previously, the Department of War)

In the past fifty years, the historiography on Stalinism has been dominated at various times by the totalitarian model, modernization, and then modernity studies, Stalin-centered “great man” approaches, and revisionist studies in social and political history. What many of these studies have had in common is their Russocentric orientation and neglect of the rural sector of the population—that is, the majority of the Soviet Union’s population in the 1930s. Our grand theories of Soviet historical development have often been based on fifteen percent of the population at best. There have been important exceptions. The work of Moshe Lewin dominated