Tag "Soviet history"

Mass graves became a reality of the first decades of Soviet Russia: victims of the revolution, famine, epidemics, political repression, the Civil War and World War II were often buried in common rather than individual graves. Over the centuries, Russians had regarded such practice as unusual and rarely acceptable. Soviet power needed to change popular mentality and give a new meaning to mass burials for both ideological and political reasons. Svetlana Malysheva studied this phenomenon.

On January 15, HSE welcomed Stephen Kotkin, Professor of History at Princeton University and Associated Senior Research Fellow at HSE’s International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences. Professor Kotkin spoke about his new book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1919-1941 (New York, 2017) to an audience of students, staff, fellow researchers and members of the general public.

On November 1, Riccardo Cucciolla began a postdoctoral fellowship at the HSE International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences. During his year at HSE, he intends to pursue a research project that follows from his dissertation entitled ‘The Crisis of Soviet Power in Central Asia: The Uzbek Cotton Affair (1975–1991)’, which he wrote while completing a PhD in Political History at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Lucca, Italy.

Alan Barenberg, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Texas Tech University, recently gave a presentation entitled ‘From the Margins to the Home Front: Vorkuta at War’ at a seminar held by the HSE International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences. In his presentation, he sought to provide insights not only about the role of forced labor in the USSR during the Second World War, but also regarding the relationship between the Gulag and Soviet society more broadly.

Yoshisada Shida, Research Associate at the Hitotsubashi University, Japan, will be one of the speakers at the XIV HSE April International Aca­demic Conference on Economic and Social Development. He gave a special interview for the HSE News Service.

In ‘Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920’ Oleg Budnitskii provides the first comprehensive historical account of the role of Jews in the Russian Civil War.