Stalin and Power

This is a seminar course and enrollment will be capped at around 25 students.

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

This course will investigate Stalin’s rise and seizure of absolute power and the way his power was reflected and understood in literature. The class will begin in the 1920s after the death of Lenin and conclude with Stalin’s death in 1953. Topics for discussion will include his use of terror, the conflicts with Trotsky and Bukharin, the liquidation of the kulaks and his attempt to regain supreme power after WWII.

Readings will concentrate on historical documents from Soviet political and governmental organs, including top secret and still classified KGB documents; novels; memoirs; transcripts of conversations with Stalin; Stalin’s personal letters; and contemporary reflections. We will read Vasily Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate; Sofia Petrovna, by Lidia Chukovskaya; along with other works that help us understand the meaning and extent of Stalin’s power and the way it shaped and was shaped by the life of the people. Stalin’s antisemitism and anti-Jewish policies will form an important sub-motif of the class.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase these books before the first day of class:

• Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya (Purchase)
• Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman (Purchase)
• Gulag Voices: An Anthology by Anne Applebaum (Purchase)
• The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov (Purchase)

The following book is optional:

• Documentary History of Communism in Russia edited by Robert V. Daniels (Purchase)

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.

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