Hoover Archives Summer Workshop 2014

See the agenda.

See the Totalitarian Regimes Workshop main page.

Hoover Participants

• Gregory, Paul R.
• Harrison, Mark
• Kotkin, Stephen
• Lin, Hsiao-ting
• Ngyuen, Lisa
• Shmelev, Anatol
• Wakin, Eric

Invited Participants

• Alexopoulos, Golfo
• Assoudeh, Elliot
• Baberowski, Jörg
• Bischl, Kerstin
• Borodkin, Leonid
• Bozzay, Vanessa
• Dimitrov, Martin
• Heinzen, James
• Il'yashenko, Vladimir
• Johnson, Emily
• Kohut, Andriy
• Miller, Christopher
• Muhlhahn, Klaus
• Pogue-Kaiser, Claire
• Sniegon, Tomas
• Teichmann, Christian
• Viatrovych, Volodymir
• van Tuyl, Penelope

Stanford Faculty

• Blaydes, Lisa
• Naimark, Norman
• Weiner, Amir

Stanford Graduate Students

• Dovern, Lukas
• Meyers, Joshua
• Pucci, Molly

Observers

• Kaple, Deborah A.

Further details

Golfo Alexopoulos received her PhD in history at the University of Chicago and is currently associate professor of history at the University of South Florida. She is the author of Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Cornell, 2003), and several articles on Soviet culture, society, and political violence in the Stalin years. She is completing her second historical monograph, Human Raw Material: Health and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag. Based largely upon recently declassified Gulag archival documents (most from the Hoover Archive), and supported by fellowships from the Hoover Institution and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the work examines the systemic violence of physical exploitation in the Stalinist camps. The book is under contract with Yale University Press and will appear in the Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War.

Eliot Assoudeh is a PhD student of political science at University of Nevada Reno. His research interests are political violence, political religion, and totalitarian regimes. His dissertation focuses on comparative study of the relationships between fascism and religion in interwar and post-1945 periods. He is a 2014 recipient of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) research grant for his project on “Apocalyptic Politics and Totalitarian Behavior.”

Jörg Baberowski is Professor of East European History at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His latest book, Verbrannte Erde. Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt (Scorched Earth: Stalin's reign of violence) was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair nonfiction prize.

Kerstin Bischl is a research fellow and PhD student at the Humboldt-University Berlin. Before, she studied history, political science and philosophy in Berlin and Voronezh, Russia. Her recent project analyzes gender relationships and dynamics of violence in the everyday life of Red Army soldiers during World War II and is financed by the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung. She argues that the Red Army soldiers’ sexualized violence was a consequence of the total warfare scenario that had been imposed on them and that brought about radicalized gender relationships and concepts of masculinity. She wants to approach the soldiers’ every day wartime experiences from a cultural-/ gender-historical perspective and combine it with the “New research on violence.”

Leonid Borodkin is a professor of history at Moscow Lomonosov State University, where he heads the Center for Economic History and Department for Historical Information Science. He serves as the co-editor of the Yearbook of Economic History and the Review of Economic History. L.Borodkin is a co-chair of the Academic Council for Russian and World Economic History at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has published intensively on the history of labor market in both the Russian and Soviet periods, including forced labor in Gulag. He was a co-editor of books on the economics of forced labor and on transformation of informal practices of Soviet times in the post-Soviet period.

Vanessa Bozzay is a graduate student in China Studies at the Free University of Berlin. She earned a BA in Chinese and Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on economic and political aspects of modern and contemporary China. She is the author of “Chinese Perspectives on China in Africa: Responses to External Criticism and Internal Debate on the Way Forward”, published in the Berliner China-Hefte / Chinese History and Society (Vol. 42, 2013). Based on previously untapped Chinese language archival materials, her current research looks at “System Change and Refugee Crisis: The Transformation of Governance Institutions in China, 1945-1957”, as part of a project of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 700), funded by the German Research Foundation.

Martin K. Dimitrov is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Tulane University. His books include Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004 and has held residential fellowships at the American Academy in Berlin; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki; the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame; the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford; the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard; and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. He is a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and a member of the board of the Confucius Institute at Tulane University.

Lukas Dovern is a PhD student in history at Stanford University. Focusing mainly on Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic, he studies the political economy of Eastern Europe since the Second World War. At Hoover, he is currently working on a project about the Polish delegation at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944.

Malgorzata Fidelisis Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She teaches courses on Eastern Europe, Modern Europe, and Gender History. Her research focuses on social and cultural issues, particularly everyday life and the relationship between individuals and state power, in post-1945 Eastern Europe. Her first book, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2010; paperback 2014), is a study of female workers and communist policies in Poland. The book's central theme explores how communist leaders and society reconciled pre-communist traditions with radically new norms imposed by the communist ideology. Her new research project concerns the social and cultural history of the “Global Sixties” in Poland, with a particular emphasis on youth and student cultures in a transnational context.

William Frucht is an Executive Editor at Yale University Press, where he acquires books in politics, law, economics and international relations. Authors with whom he has worked in the past include Timothy Garton Ash, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Thomas Sowell, Melissa Harris-Perry, Richard Florida, and William F. Buckley Jr. He is one of two editors at Yale Press responsible for the Yale-Hoover series of publications.

James Heinzen, a historian who specializes in the Soviet Union, is a Professor of History at Rowan University in New Jersey. Heinzen’s current project examines corruption in the USSR in the decades after World War II. A book based on this research, The Art of the Bribe: Corruption, Politics, and Everyday Life in the Time of Stalin, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2015. Heinzen’s research has been supported by grants from many sources including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Hoover Institution, the National Council on East European and Eurasian Research (NCEEER), and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Heinzen’s first book was titled Inventing a Soviet Countryside: The Soviet State and the Transformation of Rural Russia before Collectivization. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Vladimir Il’yashenko is a lecturer and researcher in the Historical Faculty of Moscow State University. His interests include the history of Stalinism and the history of forced labor in the USSR. His published work includes articles on “‘A camp labour force of reduced work capacity’: The Volgostroy camp during the Eastern Front (World War II),” and “The Volgostroy camp, 1935-1953: Production activities, labor force, and forced labor in hydro construction projects.” He is currently working on a dissertation about forced labor in Gulag hydro construction camps, considering the social and economic problems of forced labor.

Emily Johnson is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma and the author of How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (Penn State University Press, 2006), which won both the South Central MLA Book Prize in Cultural Studies and the Likhachev Fund's Antsiferov Prize. Other recent publications include: "A New Song for the Motherland: Eurovision and the Rhetoric of Post-Soviet National Identity" (Russian Review, 2014), "Putin, Putiniana, and the Question of a Post-Soviet Cult of Personality" (SEER, 2010; co-written with Julie Cassiday), and Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northwestern University Press, 2013; co-edited with Julie Buckler). Johnson is currently completing a book entitled Across the Urals to You: The Labor Camp Correspondence of Arsenii Formakov. While at the Hoover Institution Archive, she will work with materials from its Formakov collection.

Deborah Kaple is a Research Scholar at Princeton University. She has studied at Ohio State (BA), George Washington (MA), Princeton University (PhD), and Vermont College (MFA). Her publications include Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China, and Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, both published by Oxford University Press, as well as several articles and chapters on the Soviet Advisers Program in China in the 1950s. She is particularly interested in the intersection between the organizational politics of communist parties and international relations among the respective states. She is currently working on a book analyzing the origins and consequences of Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” and its particular impact on China. She was recently named a Behrman Fellow at Princeton.

Andriy Kohut, MA in History, is Deputy Director of the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement. He is the Head of the Digital Archive of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement. The Digital Archive contains more than 15 thousand documents culled from KGB archives. Since 2011 he has been a coordinator of a roundtables series on study of the Central and Eastern Europe post-totalitarian transformation experience in Ukraine ("Overcoming the consequences of the totalitarian past as a guarantee of establishment of a democratic state: Experience in Eastern Europe countries"). He is an expert in policy analysis in the field of humanitarian state policy, policy of national memory, and access to archives. During the winter 2013-2014, he was a coordinator of the Civic Sector of EuroMaidan.

Christopher Miller is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University. His dissertation examines the collapse of the Soviet Union's economy during the 1980s, and Moscow's attempt to learn lessons from China's economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. In 2014-2015 he will be a visiting researcher at the Hoover Institution.

Josh Meyers is a PhD Candidate at Stanford University. His research interests include Jewish politics during the Russian Revolution and the Soviet era, particularly at the regional and provincial level.

Klaus Mühlhahn is Professor of Chinese History and Culture at the Free University of Berlin. He is interested in Chinese legal history in the modern period, and the history of imperialism and Sino-Western exchanges in the twentieth century. His most recent publications include: Criminal Justice in China – A History, winner of the American Historical Association’s Fairbank Prize for 2009; "The concentration camp in global historical perspective" [History Compass 8(6)]; "'Friendly pressure': law and the individual in modern China" in Mette Halskov Hansen and Rune Svarverud (eds) China – The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society; and "National studies and global entanglements: the re-envisioning of China in the early 20th century” in Vanessa Kuennemann and Ruth Mayer (eds) Transpacific Interaction: The United States and China, 1880–1950.

Claire Pogue Kaiser is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is writing a dissertation titled "Lived Nationality: Policy and Practice in Soviet Georgia, 1945-1978," which examines how citizens came to inhabit and mobilize national identities forged through Soviet state institutions in the postwar era. She conducted archival research in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2012-2013 as an American Councils Title VIII Research and Language Scholar. At Hoover, she plans to work in several Georgians' personal papers, GARF holdings on special settlers (spetsposelentsy), and Fond 89.

Molly Pucci is a PhD candidate in history at Stanford University. She holds a BA in history from Cornell University, and an MA in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies from Harvard University. Her dissertation, "Security Empire: Building the Secret Police in Communist East Europe" is a comparative study of the building of communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany after the Second World War.

Tomas Sniegon is Senior Lecturer of European Studies at the University of Lund in Sweden. He has PhD in history. His research focuses mainly on two fields – history and memory of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union, Russia and Central Europe before and after 1991, and places and functions of the Holocaust memory in various historical cultures after 1945. He currently works on two projects: Making Sense of “Good” Soviet Communist Dictatorship Through Stalin´s Terror, Khrushchev´s Reforms and Brezhnev´s Era of Stagnation, which is based on his conversations with the former chairman of the KGB (1961-1967) Vladimir Semichastny, and Extermination Camps as Holocaust Museums; Do We Learn to Respect, to Come Together, or to Hate Each Other? which is a comparative study of the postwar development of the sites of memory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec and Kulmhof/Chelmno nad Nerem. His book Vanished History. The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak historical culture was published by Berghahn Books in May 2014.

Christian Teichmann is is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. His main area of interest is Soviet history with a special focus on Central Asia, agriculture and environment, and Stalinist governance. Currently, he is preparing the publication of his first book A World of Disorder: Nature and Power in Stalin’s Central Asia.

Volodymyr Viatrovych, PhD, is an historian, publicist, and civic activist. He is currently Director of the of Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. He lectures at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. As Director of the Security Service of Ukraine Archives in 2008-2010, he opened the KGB archives to the public. In 2010-2011 he was a senior visiting scholar at Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute. In 2002 he founded the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement, a non-governmental research institution which is a member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience. In 2009, in cooperation with the Security Service of Ukraine, the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement co-founded the Lontsky Prison National Memorial Museum in Lviv, at the site of the previous KGB and Gestapo prison. Defending the right to access the Soviet-period archives, in cooperation with the Lviv National University of Ivan Franko, the Center for Research on the Liberation Movement created a Digital Archive of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement. The Digital Archive contains more than 14 thousand documents. Volodymyr Viatrovych is the author of six books and co-author of three. In 2013-2014 he was a leading activist of the Civic Sector of EuroMaidan.

Penelope Van Tuyl is the Deputy Director of the UC Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center and the Asian International Justice Initiative and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. An American lawyer, Penelope received her J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law, and is admitted to practice in the state of California. Penelope oversees several key WCSC/AIJI projects, including the annual Summer Institute in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, the “Virtual Tribunal” project, and our regional trial monitoring programs at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. She has authored and edited numerous reports and articles on international criminal law and procedure, and taught courses in law and rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley Her research interests touch on Human rights rhetoric and practice, as well as substantive, procedural, and administrative aspects of international criminal trial practice.