Redefining Stalinism

Is there a Western world leader whose reputation has not been re-analysed and reassessed, usually to his or her detriment? With this question, Harold Shukman introduces Redefining Stalinism , a collection of articles published 50 years after Stalin’s death. With the opening of Soviet archives to an unprecedented degree since the demise of the USSR, totalitarian and revisionist arguments about Stalin and the Stalinist system can be more closely explored. Topics range from a survey of recent Western views of Stalin’s Russia, to an account of Stalin’s approach to intelligence, two separate analyses of totalitarianism, the politics of obligation, the cult of the dead in Soviet political memory, and the de-mythologising of Stalin in the years immediately following his death.