Author Archives: Steve Barnes
Open Access – Change Is Inevitable
The tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz has brought a new round of discussion around the issues of open access academic publishing. Even the field of Russian history has gotten involved in the discussion, driven by Sean Guillory’s thoughtful blog post. … Continue reading
Video Conference Class with HSE
In an interesting interview, Irina Filatova, a professor of African history at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics (HSE), offers her thoughts about the continued importance of de-Stalinization for Russia and discusses a new course she and I will … Continue reading
Death and Redemption – Responses, but not answers
Thanks to Golfo Alexopoulos and Dan Healey for joining the conversation. It is pleasing to see that not only are new young scholars writing about the Gulag, but some of the best established scholars like Golfo and Dan have turned … Continue reading
Death and Redemption – Reforging, Reeducation, Redemption
So many interesting posts in this discussion, I feel like I could write an entire article responding to all of it. Here, I want to try to address some issues brought up initially by Jeff Hardy and in the comments … Continue reading
Death and Redemption – On Images
First, I must thank my colleague and co-blogger Andrew Jenks for setting up this blog conversation here at Russian History Blog. As an academic author, I have found the wait for journal reviews of my book to be excruciating. The … Continue reading
The Stalin Cult – A Blog Conversation
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-Il, Joseph Stalin. The mere sound of these names conjures up mental images of the personality cult–films, monuments, renamed cities, prose, poetry, and, perhaps most of all, portraiture all designed to raise a … Continue reading
New Teaching Russian History Blog
Karl Qualls Associate Professor of Russian History at Dickinson College and author of From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Cornell, 2009) has just launched Teaching History, a new blog that will focus heavily on … Continue reading
Putin, the Russian Protests, and Historical Parallels
My thanks to Elizabeth Wood, who follows up on her blog essay for the Boston Globe, which I referenced in an earlier post, with a pointer to some other interesting articles on the web. So, the remainder of this post … Continue reading
Open-Access and the General Public
I have written here and elsewhere on the reasons I decided to launch the Russian History Blog. One reason is a commitment to open access scholarship–to make the products of our scholarly research freely available to the general public. Most … Continue reading
On the (Mis)application of Russian History to an Analysis of the Protests
Many of you no doubt know of the work of MIT’s Elizabeth Wood. She has turned her attention in recent years from Russian revolutionary gender politics and early Soviet propaganda trials to the cult of Putin in contemporary Russia. Wood … Continue reading
Why Russian Historians Should Blog
Next Saturday morning, at the annual ASEEES convention in Washington, DC, I will join fellow Russian History Blog-ger Andrew Jenks, New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies and Sean’s Russia Blog‘s Sean Guillory, and Harvard University’s Kelly O’Neill in a … Continue reading
Gulag Boss – Final Thoughts
Thanks to everyone for their participation in this first Russian History Blog conversation. I think we are finding some new ways to talk about books, and I hope to do more of this in the future. All of the commentary … Continue reading
Gulag Boss: On Truths and Silences
First, thanks to all the contributors to this discussion. Honestly, it has to this point exceeded my expectations. The intellectual content has been high, the questions thought-provoking, and the traffic heavy. For a moment, I want to dwell on the … Continue reading
Gulag Boss – A Blog Conversation
Welcome to the first Russian History Blog conversation. If you have not, do take a quick look at my introduction to these Blog Conversations. In this post, I want to introduce briefly the subject of our discussion and provide a … Continue reading
Blog Conversations
Starting Wednesday, Russian History Blog will host what hopefully will be the first in a series of blog conversations. On Wednesday, I will provide a more formal introduction to this particular blog conversation (on the new memoir Gulag Boss), but … Continue reading
Interview on Death and Redemption
Princeton University Press published my book, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society in May. I had the great pleasure to talk about the book with Sean Guillory (of Sean’s Russia Blog) at New Books in … Continue reading
ASEEES NewsNet Article on Russian History Blog
If you haven’t seen it yet, please do visit the first all-digital edition of the ASEEES NewsNet, where you will find an article by yours truly that discusses the origins and the goals of Russian History Blog along with a … Continue reading
Webcast Book Talk
Just a quick heads up that I will be speaking about my new book, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, (now available in Kindle and Nook editions) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. … Continue reading
Call for Web-based Teaching Resources
Given my own penchant for sharing YouTube videos here at Russian History Blog and the recent posts from Miriam Dobson and Alison Smith sharing some phenomenal historical photographs, it seems appropriate to start gathering a list of everyone’s favorite online … Continue reading
Rapping about the Divided Memory of Victory
Today marks the 66th anniversary of Victory Day. As Sean Guillory notes in a must-read post, victory, like so many other aspects of 20th century east European history, is remembered quite differently in many post-Soviet and post-Communist states. He writes: … Continue reading
