Stalin’s Economic Advisors
Kyung Deok Roh Soviet foreign policy in the Stalin era is commonly assumed to have been a direct product of either Marxist ideology or the leader’s whims. Both assumptions, however, oversimplify the complex and subtle factors involved in its creation and implementation. Kyung-Deok Roh provides an alternative, more nuanced, explanation and demonstrates the key role played by Stalin’s economic advisors. The so-called...
Stalin’s Italian Prisoners of War
Maria Teresa Giusti Stalin’s Italian Prisoners of War (CEU Press, Budapest, 2020, forthcoming) This book reconstructs the fate of Italian prisoners of war captured by the Red Army between August 1941 and the winter of 1942/43. Of 230,000 Italians left on the Eastern front almost 100,000 did not come back home. Testimonies and memoirs from surviving veterans complement the author’s intensive work in Russian and Italian archives. The...
The Kremlin Letters
David Reynolds, Vladimir Pechtnov The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 2018). Stalin exchanged more than six hundred messages with Allied leaders Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. In this riveting volume—the fruit of a unique British-Russian scholarly collaboration—the messages are published and also analyzed within their historical context....
Les enfants de Staline. La guerre des partisans soviétiques (Paris: Seuil, 2018)
Masha Verovic Au moins 500 000 combattants, autant de morts, civils dans leur écrasante majorité, plus de 5 000 villages biélorusses incendiés, dont plus de 600 entièrement détruits avec toute leur population : derrière ces chiffres s’esquisse la tragédie du plus puissant mouvement de résistance armée à l’occupation nazie en Europe. Ce livre rend leur voix aux partisans soviétiques, combattants aguerris menant une guerre impitoyable,...
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
Stephen Kotkin In 1941, history’s largest, most horrific war ever broke out, between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Some 55 million people were killed worldwide in WWII, half in the Soviet Union. Who was Joseph Stalin? Who was Adolf Hitler? Why did they clash? This lecture, based upon a book of the same name, uses a vast array of once secret documents to trace the rise of Soviet Communism and its deadly rivalry with Nazism. ...
