Critical review essay on Slezkine’s “House of Government,” its millenarian thesis, and the emergent genre of academic blockbuster to which it belongs.

This article argues that the framework of the revolutionary life cycle can become a richly interpretive lens for Russian/Soviet historians of the entire late imperial and Soviet periods. The first section critically reviews the history of the approach and its recent revival in the field of comparative revolutions, focusing on the frequently flawed…[Read more]

Russian translation of “Russian-Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled?” published in NLO

NLO discussion: David-Fox’s response to the commentaries on “Russian-Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled?” [in Russian] by 11 anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and historians (Timur Atnashev, Andy Byford, Alexander Etkind, Bruce Grant, Catriona Kelly, Ilya Kalinin, Kirill Kobrin, Stephen Lovell, Ale…[Read more]

first para: When Kritika published a special issue in 2001 on the state of the field ten
years after the end of communism, it was logical to include a reassessment of
the October Revolution and two pieces on the rapidly developing investigation
of the Stalin period. Transnational history went unmentioned, along with
international and…[Read more]

Orig. English version of NLO article translated and published in Russian translation as: “Modernost’ v Rossii i SSSR: otsutstvuiushchaia, obshchaia, al’ternativnaia, perepletennaia?”)