PROGRAM

Join us at Roosevelt House as we welcome Stephen Kotkin, the John P. Birkelund ’52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University and vice dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, as he discusses his book Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Penguin), the first installment in a three-volume history of Stalin and his times. Using military intelligence and secret police materials, the volume offers new insights into Stalin’s paranoid mentality and explains how chaos from revolution and civil war became a permanent feature of Soviet administration. The work also portrays Stalin’s trip to Siberia in 1928 in a new light, capturing the moment when he decided to remake Eurasia, and places the decision for collectivization more deeply than ever in the tragic history of imperial Russia. Introductory remarks by Elidor Mehilli, Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College.

This event is co-sponsored by the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, the Russian Club and the Division of Russian and Slavic Languages of the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies at Hunter College.