Michael David-Fox

Examining the exercise of power in Smolensk province under Stalinism and Nazi occupation during WWII, this project cross-fertilizes three dynamic areas of the study of the war: Stalinism, the German occupation on the Eastern Front, and the Holocaust. It aims to connect regional history to the grand narrative by linking four levels of analysis: biographies and lived experience; the use and limits of political power in a succession of sudden regime changes; the role and nature of ideology—the Sphinx’s Riddle of Soviet studies; and political violence in this twentieth-century world of extremes, from collectivization to the Holocaust. By interpreting new archival troves of autobiographical documents in terms of regimes of power, the project provides a model for fusing local depth with synthetic, comparative sweep.