Inside the Stalin Archives; Discovering the New Russia

New York: Atlas & Co, 2008. Book Club Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 7.5 inches. [4], 335, [1] pages. Notes. DJ has wear, tears and soiling. Illustrations. Mild page discoloration. Jonathan Brent (born 1949) is an American academic, author, historian and publisher. As a publisher, he is the director of the Annals of Communism series, which he founded in 1992. He is currently the CEO and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College. He received a B.A. from Columbia University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Chicago. He is a writer, publisher, and teacher who has lectured around the world on subjects of Soviet and modern Jewish history. His books have been translated into multiple languages.
From 1981-1991, Brent was editor-in-chief and director of the Northwestern University Press, where he established the series in East European and Russian literature. He served as editorial director and associate director of the Yale University Press from 1991-2009. In 1981, Brent founded the literary magazine Formations, which specialized in East European writing and thought. In 2009, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research named him its executive director and CEO. In 2014, with the cooperation of the government of the Republic of Lithuania Brent established the landmark Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project at The YIVO Institute to preserve and digitize approximately 2.5 million documents and 12,200 books representing 500 years of Jewish history in Eastern Europe and Russia. From the first publisher granted access to Stalin's personal archive, a provocative and insightful portrait of modern Russia, the most compelling since David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb. To most Americans, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent asks, why didn't this happen? Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow's airport? Brent draws on fifteen years of unprecedented access to high-level Soviet Archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with Mercedes. Stalin's specter hovers throughout, and in the book's crescendo Brent takes us deep into the dictator's personal papers to glimpse the dark heart of the new Russia. Both cultural history and personal memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia in the twenty-first century. Derived from a Kirkus review: Illuminating view of the difficulties of writing recent history in a land still suffering from it. Brent first traveled to Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet regime?s collapse, when it seemed everything was for sale. His goal was the acquisition of Soviet archives, including the personal archives of Stalin, with an eye to producing a series of books, Annals of Communism. To achieve it, he notes, he had to take up smoking and swallow endless shots of vodka. He had to spend money. He had to contend with corruption, anti-Semitism and the continuing apotheosis of a murderous dictator. He also had to develop a special kind of etiquette that, more than anything else, simply signaled respect for the apparatchiks, scholars and intermediaries he had to deal with. By Brent?s account, he did all these things?accomplishing the last by shaking off his press?s insistent lawyer and cutting deals in a rather free-form fashion as the situation dictated. Clearly Brent is sympathetic to the Russians. After all, he writes, he studied the language not just to read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but also to understand the lyrics sung by the Red Army Chorus. He possesses the blend of scholarship and entrepreneurship that characterizes a good university-press editor, and any aspiring publisher will find much to learn by following his acquisition of the last tsaritsa?s personal diary and his wranglings with various hands-out souls. A welcome book, of particular interest to Russian historians and bibliophiles alike.