Michael David-Fox — Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule – with Michael Kimmage

During the Cold War, the Smolensk Archive held the only collection of Communist Party documents available to Western scholars, becoming the foundation for generations of scholarship on Soviet history. Crucibles of Power returns to the Smolensk Region with fresh eyes and fresh sources. Prizewinning historian Michael David-Fox traces the experiences of Smolensk residents between the interwar years and the end of World War II, a period during which the city and region passed from Stalinist rule to Nazi occupation and back. The result is a revelatory examination of choice and power under dueling forms of murderous totalitarianism.

Exploring the life-and-death decisions of a fascinating cast of characters–from young women in the Communist Youth League to a defense lawyer during Stalin’s Great Terror who became Smolensk’s collaborationist mayor during the German occupation–David-Fox shows how deeply the Stalinist and Nazi regimes relied on the cooptation of average citizens motivated by greed and need, but always within the orbit of ideology. Challenging today’s Russian nationalist narrative of heroic WWII resistance, he finds that large numbers of Russians aided the Nazi occupation of Smolensk in order to protect themselves, secure their own self-interest, or pursue vendettas against a Soviet state they found no less corrupt or oppressive than its German foe.

At a time when much of the world is tilting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism, Crucibles of Power masterfully unravels the threads of dictatorial rule. Smolensk emerges as a laboratory for understanding the mechanics of both outright coercion and subtler forms of power, as well as the enabling behavior of ordinary citizens acquiescing to extraordinary crimes.

Michael David-Fox is the author or editor of fifteen books, including Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union and Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941. He is Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies and Professor of History at Georgetown University.

David-Fox will be in conversation with Michael Kimmage. Kimmage, Director of the Kennan Institute, is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he handled the Ukraine/Russia portfolio. He is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy. He writes regularly for Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, and other publications.