The REEES Program at Yale presents Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule with Michael David-Fox from Georgetown University.
Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard University Press, 2025, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674247468), is David-Fox’s exploration of World War II–era Smolensk—a region that served as a crossroads between Stalinist and Nazi regimes. The work cross-fertilizes three fields (the study of Stalinism, Nazi German occupation on the Eastern Front during World War II, and the Holocaust) with an array of new Russian-language and German archival sources. Aiming squarely at the place where local and regional history meet the grand narrative, the book examines the workings of power and the dilemma of choice in extreme conditions. The book highlights a significant group that has not been given as much attention as it deserves: ordinary people, far
from the halls of power, who in an hour of crisis reached out to grab a slice of power for themselves. Crucibles of Power explains how the depths of the twentieth century speak to our own troubled times with new questions and a new urgency.
MICHAEL DAVID-FOX is Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University, where he is Professor in the School of Foreign Service and Department of History. He is founding and executive editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, author or editor of 15 books and editor of 13 special theme issues of journals. His most recent edited volume is The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations (2023); another edited volume, “Interrogating the Interrogators: History, Politics, and the Opening of Soviet Secret Police Archives in Ukraine,” is in in press. He received his PhD from Yale and his BA from Princeton.
David-Fox’s single-authored books include Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 (1997), Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (2011), and Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (2015). His Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule was published by Harvard University Press in 2025.
This event is hybrid.