Jörg Baberowski, “Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror”

European University Institute

 

Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror

 

Dates: Wed 15 Feb 2017 17.00 – 19.00

 

Seminar Room 4, Badia Fiesolana 

 

Scorched Earth depicts Stalinism as a cruel and deliberate attack on Russian society, driven by ‘totalitarian ambitions’ and the goal of modernizing and rationalizing a backward people. Baberowski takes a twofold approach, emphasizing Stalin’s personal role and responsibility as well as the continuity he sees in Communist aims and ideology since 1917. Unlike recent apologist accounts that focus on the challenges of modernization or on the operational complexities of managing the Soviet state, this hard-hitting analysis unequivocally locates the origins of the terror in the culture of violence and the techniques of power. Detailed, well-documented, and including many new details on the workings of the Stalinist state, this powerful work encompasses the dictator’s brutal reign from his achievement of total power in 1929 to his death in 1953.

 

Jörg Baberowski is professor of Eastern European history at Humboldt University in Berlin. His publications include Der Rote Terror. Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (2003); Der Sinn der Geschichte. Geschichtstheorien von Hegel bis Foucault (2005); Verbrannte Erde. Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt (2012) and Räume der Gewalt (2015).

 

Location: Seminar Room 4, Badia Fiesolana

Affiliation: Department of History and Civilization

Type: Lecture

Organiser: Professor Pavel Kolar (EUI)

Speaker: Professor Joerg Baberowski (Humboldt Universität)

 

http://www.eui.eu/events/detail.aspx?eventid=130936