ABSTRACT
Fifty years after ‘Koba the Dread’ passed away the ‘Stalin industry’ flourishes as never before. There are two principal reasons for this. First, since the Soviet collapse a vast amount of documentary material has become accessible—even though Stalin’s personal archive, and that of the security police, is still under wraps. This situation is in stark contrast to that prior to glasnost’, when foreign students of the USSR had little more to go on than whatever material the censors permitted to appear in print. It is entirely appropriate that scholars from outside the FSU, often in collaboration with Russian colleagues, should have hastened to exploit these resources with the aim, not just of filling in those once celebrated ‘blank spots’ in the historical record, but also of drawing a more accurate and hopefully more objective picture of what was really going on in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1953. The present survey, which can offer no more than a provisional assessment, seeks to give an impression of the range of the vast amount of work done over the last few years, with an emphasis on social and cultural history, and to highlight both the potential and the attendant risks of the new methodological approaches that have been adopted. 1
