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Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia Hardcover – December 17, 2008

by Jonathan Brent (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 21 ratings
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From the first publisher granted access to Stalin's personal archive, a provocative and insightful portrait of modern Russia—the most compelling since David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb.

To most Americans, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent asks, why didn't this happen? Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow's airport?

Brent draws on fifteen years of unprecedented access to high-level Soviet Archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with Mercedes. Stalin's specter hovers throughout, and in the book's crescendo Brent takes us deep into the dictator's personal papers to glimpse the dark heart of the new Russia. Both cultural history and personal memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia in the twenty-first century.

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  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Atlas
  4. Publication date
    December 17, 2008
  5. Dimensions
    0.54 x 0.13 x 0.74 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0977743330
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0977743339
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In a strongly-written, fascinating, and original book, Jonathan Brent interweaves portraits of Russians in their daily lives with an astute analysis of Joseph Stalin's legacy.” (Philip Roth)

“Inside the Stalin Archives is a necessary report from the Soviet netherworld of totalizing injustice that ought to have been universally known throughout the greater part of the twentieth century—when it could not have existed. Jonathan Brent’s discoveries will shake and shock and indispensably enlighten.” (Cynthia Ozick)

“The author is careful to make neither heroes nor villains of the ghosts he summons from the archives, incorporating flawed personalities into stories of unthinkable justice.” (Katya Tylevich - readrussia.com)

“Brent seized a unique opportunity that, if not for him, would doubtless have been missed….[H]is book shows us the conditions—moral, personal, and material—that Russians take for granted but which are utterly unlike anything Americans have ever experienced.” (Gary Saul Morson - The New Criterion)

“In the first part of his engaging and well-written memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives, Brent tells the story of the [Annals of Communism's] genesis. He conjures up the Moscow of the early 1990s, a time when the Russians were struggling to recover from the loss of the old certainties following the collapse of the Soviet system and adapt to a market-based economy.” (Orlando Figes - The New York Review)

“A fascinating, subtle, and finely written quest into the Russia of today through the dark labyrinth of history. Brent unveils not only the secrets of his journeys into Soviet Archives, but also a unique yet personal portrait of an enigmatic country and a blood-soaked century.” (Simon Sebag Montefiore)

“Brent's engaging memoir . . . reveals as much about the grim realities of post-Soviet life and bureaucracy as it does about the archives themselves. Equipped with little Russian and few contacts, but with an almost palpable sense of decency and honest intentions that illuminate his book, Brent explains for the general reader as well as for specialists how he went about his work in the new Russia.” (Martin Walker - New York Times Review of Books)

About the Author

Jonathan Brent is the editorial director of Yale University Press, where he founded the Annals of Communism series in 1991. He is the coauthor of Stalin's Last Crime, and a frequent contributor to the New Criterion, the Observer, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He teaches Soviet literature and history at Bard College and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atlas; First Edition (December 17, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0977743330
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0977743339
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.54 x 0.13 x 0.74 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 21 ratings

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Jonathan Brent

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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
21 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

R.JORDAN
5.0 out of 5 stars Very Worthwhile.
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2015
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Enlightening, broadening. As with too many books, it doesn't "get going" until you get into awhile. But it has the first explanation of Stalin's philosophy--why he ruled using terror and brutality. The author knows many Russians, even a KGB general. It's surprising that Russians of status would be open--yet all are convinced that their homes and offices are "bugged." Why? The general says, "They [KGB] don't know. But they record/listen anyway. Just in case." Not a big book but full. Perhaps a re-do and enlarging would benefit it, but as it is, it is of value.
4 people found this helpful
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Bart Mills
5.0 out of 5 stars Unmissable look at Russia's struggle with self-examination
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2017
When a leader’s method of ruling is to change the nature of truth, it’s hard to pin down what actually happened after he dies. The hows and whys of the glorious disaster of Josef Stalin’s 30-year dictatorship were obscured by his successors’ need to cover up the details. “Down the memory hole,” to quote Orwell, went Stalin’s secrets of mass murder, misjudgment and paranoid plotting. Yet some dedicated archivists survived into the Yeltsin years and knew where some of the bodies were buried.
Yale University Press editorial director Jonathan Brent out-hustled publishers from all over the world to forge relationships with the Russian keepers of the flame and publish a series of volumes revealing chapter and verse of Stalin’s decades of misrule. “Inside the Stalin Archives” is his personal story of his quest for the truth against the forces of reaction, fear and forgetting. It’s a fascinating tale of what it looks like to see a nation’s struggle with self-examination.
I traveled to the Soviet Union and later to the new Russia, and the externals of Brent’s adventures ring very true—the deprivation stoically endured, the new freedoms naively embraced, the stern reaction the reigns today in the midst of oligarchical excess. Brent took me behind the obvious to the beating heart of Stalinism and its legacy. Many Yale volumes have the actual words of the dictator and his minions as they were setting up and preserving their control, but Brent’s semi-memoir is about the quest and his personal encounter with the bloody past. At the end, Brent tells about fingering the pages of Stalin’s own composing and editing of his regime’s directives and explanations. This is living, personal history, and unmissable for those interested in Russia’s past.
2 people found this helpful
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Mallow
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting insight
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2009
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This is a nice narrative about the steps required to obtain, for the world to see, what went on behind the scenes, both in the Archives themselves, and in negotiations to reveal them. One realizes that there was a brief interval during which this was possible, and that, had it been missed, we would once again be returned to the obscurity, so characteristic of Russia, of the present. That would have been the loss of a unique opportunity, to see and understand a uniquely evil period in mankind's history.
2 people found this helpful
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J. Moran
5.0 out of 5 stars A Different Stalin
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2009
Jonathan Brant arrived in Moscow in January 1992 to negotiate with Russian officials for Yale University Press for access to Soviet historical archives previously unavailable to outsiders. Many trips followed over the next fifteen years. They provide a loose connective thread for this memoir. They also allowed the personal contacts and observations that anchor the book. Brant raises complex questions including why many Russians still esteem both Stalin, a paranoid tyrant, and the oppressive regime he created; and why Russians have acquiesced to Putin's regime as it persistently curtailed democracy and freedom.

This book is very much a personal memoir, not a scholarly analysis. Brant offers no formal analysis or final answers. He speaks of the disruption and near chaos in Russian society in January 1992, of the perceived incompetence of the Yeltsin government, of the dissolution of what had been a Russian empire built over almost 400 years and of Russia's loss of international position and prestige. All this was a huge blow to the Russian people who were proud of the old society's accomplishments, achieved at enormous cost in blood and suffering. In the popular view, as well as in the view of some of the elite, Stalin was the architect of all this civil and military success.

By comparison, the new regime presided over a breakdown of public order, the collapse of the economy, an end to empire and a much diminished role in the world. No wonder, the book implies, that many in this proud nation are nostalgic for the Soviet regime and are willing to forgive much to the "great leader" who supposedly brought all this success about. Nor is it surprising that the people support Putin, whose regime has (in the popular view) done much to restore public order, international prestige and economic prosperity.

I was particularly struck by two features of the book. One was the vignettes offered of life in Russia in the early years of Brant's trips there. Society was almost literally turned upside down and it seemed to many that the worst elements had taken over and reduced everything to chaos. Brant's personal observations and contacts with Russians from this period are enlightening and sometimes quite moving.

The second feature was even more eye-opening for me. Before reading this book I thought of Stalin as a typical murderous and paranoid tyrant, a megalomaniac essentially ruling by terror alone while claiming a nonexistent deep understanding of the revolutionary theories of which he proclaimed himself the champion. My view was wrong.

Brant got access to Stalin's personal working library. Historical and theoretical works were heavily and insightfully annotated in Stalin's own hand. Stalin also personally oversaw work on official publications expressing Communist theory and doctrine in various formats. He very frequently rewrote them heavily, invariably making the publications better: shorter, tighter, more accurately stated and more vividly phrased. Paranoid, murderous and megalomaniacal he was, but he was far from an intellectual lightweight. Even his most infamous policies were the product of deep (if wrongheaded) thought and study.

As noted, this book is a personal memoir and not a formal study. It is anecdotal and suggestive rather than analytical in approach. And occasionally it is a bit digressive. Yet its anecdotes are revealing and its suggestions largely convincing.
5 people found this helpful
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Jared Christopher McCann
1.0 out of 5 stars Unfocused
Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2009
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I have a meager idea of what the author intended to accomplish with this book. Tidbits of interest meander through the topic of the Archives, to change in Russia to anti-Semitism and back again. What was his purpose? I assume he had too little material for the title topic, so he included tangentially related topics to fill the pages. While these are interesting, they are poorly related.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Debo
5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging account of a book editor's quixotic quest to ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2015
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An engaging account of a book editor's quixotic quest to publish the darkest secrets of Stalinist mania -- which, remarkably, ended with success. Then-editor of Yale University Press, scholar Jonathan Brent left desk and growing family behind for an extended stay in puzzling, chaotic, but frequently endearing pre-Putin Moscow, where citizens were finding their way through massive change. Scantily funded, Brent mucked in at one of the multi-family apartments legendary in the Soviet era and made the rounds of eccentric bureaucrats. Brent's is first and foremost an adventure tale -- Tom Sawyer unlocks Kremlin doors -- but also delivers insight on the post-Soviet Oz Russians continue to struggle through.
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chris elliott
5.0 out of 5 stars The Father of all Peoples.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 17, 2016
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One of the best of it's type. I have over 50 books on the old brute and plenty on the Soviet Union but really is a first class introduction to the man and his system. Recommended.
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Andrew Lale
1.0 out of 5 stars Promised much, delivered little
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 1, 2009
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When I read the blurb about this book, I was very excited. What happened at the core of Russian power since the collapse of the Berlin wall? What is this strangely unpleasant beast that now controls the Russian state (and I don't mean just Putin)? What continuities are there between Soviet Russia and Yeltsin/Putins Russia? All are fascinating subjects.
How much will you discover about them from this book? Precious little. Towards the end are some tasters about how for Russians the state itself came to represent the highest order of life, for which any individual life could and should be sacrificed without question. Something Americans living under Obama might want to mull over. But this is a weird amalgam of anecdote, super-realist observation and sly hints about continuities in Russian life from its darkest soviet moments.
The observations about Stalin were occasionally insightful, but did not in any way get to grips with the enormous amount of murder which that man caused, and what even one murder constitutes in the real world. Just because he's fascinating does not free him one tiny iota from his enormous evilness.
What happens when a state is taken over by its own 'security' services? We'll see.
5 people found this helpful
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