Wall Street Journal - Gary Saul Morson
Through diaries, memoirs and other documents illuminating the lives of individual Soviet citizens, Mr. David-Fox evokes the turbulent experience of what he calls ‘the crucial elements of choice, decision making, and agency.’
John Connelly
With the erudition of a historian and the acuity of a master storyteller, David-Fox puts us in the company of people who lived then and there. An essential book for anyone curious about life under totalitarian power.
Peter Holquist
A true tour de force. This book deserves to be read by anyone interested in the war in the East, Soviet rule, or the twentieth century more broadly.
Mark Edele
An examination of power dynamics in radically illiberal regimes, Crucibles of Power is a masterful study of a past full of unsettling resonances with the present. Deeply theorized yet fluently written, this book guides us through the histories of Stalinism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and World War II in Russia’s Smolensk Region.
Oleg Budnitskii
Smolensk is a kind of sacred land for American historiography. Drawing on a huge amount of new material from Russian archives, this book examines Smolensk primarily during World War II, when the inhabitants of this westernmost region of Russia had to endure two changes of power and compare the effects of Nazism and Stalinism on their own skin. Crucibles of Power will appeal not only to professional historians but also to a much wider range of readers.
Serhii Plokhy
In this examination of the Smolensk Archives, which laid the foundation for American understandings of Soviet power, Michael David-Fox offers a much more complicated and comprehensive presentation of Soviet power relations than previously available. Crucibles of Power is a masterpiece of historical analysis and narration, and a sterling example of how new methodologies and new archives can come together to change our understanding of the past.
Foreign Affairs - Maria Lipman
A detailed examination of the tragic history of the western Soviet territories that swapped hands between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany twice between 1941 and 1943.
Kirkus Reviews
2024-11-23
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.
