In Melvin Leffler’s book For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, the author identifies five key moments of the Cold War and seeks to understand why American and Soviet leaders were unable to bridge their differences. By focusing on individual leaders, Leffler explores the backgrounds and experiencesContinue reading “For the Soul of Mankind – Review”
Category Archives: Soviet Union
Soviet Collectivization: A Historiographical Essay
In the 1920s, following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the leader of the Bolsheviks Vladimir Lenin distanced the newly formed government from the policies of War Communism through a series of decrees. Under War Communism, the Bolshevik Party practiced class warfare against the peasants and justified the use of force to carryContinue reading “Soviet Collectivization: A Historiographical Essay”
Review – Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia by Gabriel Gorodetsky
Gabriel Gorodetsky’s study Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia examines the foreign policy of the Soviet Union from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In this study, Gorodetsky asserts that Stalin’s foreign and military policy were non-ideological and based on realpolitikContinue reading “Review – Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia by Gabriel Gorodetsky”
Review – The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship
Recently, the Russian government transferred thirty-one Politburo transcripts, or stenograms, from the Presidential Archives to the Russia State Archive of Social and Political History. This relocation essentially declassified the documents and opened them to academic research, and the present volume includes twelve essays from both western and Russian scholars whose studies attempt to elucidate theContinue reading “Review – The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship”
Douglas I. Bell 