CRUCIBLES OF POWER

An unsettling look at dictatorial rule.

David-Fox, a historian at Georgetown University, writes how, after overrunning the western Soviet city of Smolensk in 1941, Nazis shipped many of their archives back home, where they became available to Harvard Sovietologist Merle Fainsod for his “foundational” 1958 account of how the prewar city was governed: Smolensk Under Soviet Rule. “A good deal of what was known about Soviet history during the Cold War came from Smolensk,” David-Fox writes. The temporary opening of all Soviet archives after 1990 allowed David-Fox to research a far more expansive history, from the Stalin Revolution of the 1920s through “the German occupation of 1941-1943 and the subsequent restoration of Soviet power.” Amazingly, he turns up half a dozen individuals who kept journals or spoke to researchers later, revealing details of a grotesquely Orwellian experience. He begins before 1930, when Stalin decided to jump-start industrialization by collectivizing agriculture. It succeeded—after disruption, violence, and famine—but left the USSR with a permanently unproductive agricultural sector. Then came Stalin’s Great Terror, a nightmare of arrests and executions of purported traitors that was resolved before the 1939 Nazi-Soviet friendship pact. After their apparently easy victory in 1941, most Nazis accepted Hitler’s order to kill the “Judeo-Bolshevik” elite of the USSR and starve the remaining “subhuman” Slavs out of existence or reduce them to slavery. Although the result was massive atrocities, many local Nazi officials understood that controlling their vast conquests (nearly 70 million people at its peak) required some cooperation, and millions of Soviet citizens collaborated and even bore arms. Reconquest in 1943 brought mass retribution, but rebuilding after the destruction left by the Nazis persuaded many leaders to advocate relative moderation. Stalinism returned, disappointing peasants who hated collectivization and idealists working for a system that valued loyalty over competence. But David-Fox assures readers that it didn’t last.

Invaluable insights into two genuine dystopias.