Hoover research fellow Paul Gregory spoke about his book Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives today at the opening of the sixth annual Hoover Soviet Archives Workshop. Hoover distinguished visiting fellow and Oxford University history professor Robert Service moderated the event. The event can be viewed on C-SPAN’s Book-TV.
The Hoover Soviet Archives Workshop invites scholars from around the world to conduct research for two weeks in the Hoover Institution Archives, one of the world’s richest on the history of communism. Participants in past workshops have published more than fifty articles and some twenty books, many of which are being published in a new Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the cold war.
The opening of the once-secret Soviet state and party archives in the early 1990s was an event of exceptional significance. When Western scholars broke down the official wall of secrecy that had stood for decades, they gained access to intriguing new knowledge they had previously only had been able to speculate about. In Lenin’s Brain Gregory takes us behind the scenes and into the archives to illuminate the dark inner workings of the Soviet Union.
Gregory holds an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, Texas, and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. Gregory has worked in the Hoover Institution Archives for almost a decade.
