A New Approach to Stalinism and Nazism

Burzlaff and Hellbeck are most concerned with this dimension of the book, but, tellingly, they take almost diametrically opposite positions. To be sure, both appreciate the analytical payoffs to be had in the book from examining Stalinism, Nazism, and the Holocaust, historically all too separated as fields, in one frame. Both observe how the book did not treat Smolensk as a backwater or periphery but as a crossroads relevant, even central to east European and European history. Both noted with approval that the book sidesteps the concept and framework of totalitarianism (for which I have been taken to task elsewhere). I decided to do this precisely to avoid flattening comparisons and predominantly top-down conceptions of power. In all my work on Stalinism and the interwar period, I have never used totalitarianism as my own analytical framework.

To be clear, I do not reject the totalitarianism concept in all contexts. The reason the idea has persisted, remains popular, and will never go away is because some regimes, and these two in particular, do in fact stand out from run-of-the-mill authoritarianisms. The totalitarianism concept, however, has differing, complex, and particular philosophical, social scientific, historical lineages. Each of them has different explanatory schema attached to it. All three of them run against, to borrow Burzlaff’s apt terminology, the book’s granular depiction of power as multifarious and fractured, or to use my own terms, soft as well as hard even in these most violent “movement-regimes” (Robert C. Tucker). Crucibles treats power as operating in many different levels and dimensions, as well as improvised and appropriated—not only by de facto necessity but by systemic intent in both revolutionary regimes of Left and Right—at the local level.

For Burzlaff, however, the book’s ambition of crossing the 1941 divide illuminates how “habits, categories, and decisions,” as he puts it, “bled across regimes.” To him this was a fundamental payoff of following biographical logics, one of the book’s main concepts, across two regime changes in Smolensk region in three years. Burzlaff puts it better than I did: “In Smolensk, Nazi and Soviet systems overlapped, echoed, and contaminated one another.” For the cadres of violence whose lives I investigated, such as the executioner-turned-partisan Fedor Gnezdilov, the prewar period was a training ground for the war. For many others, including at times Boris Menʹshagin, what they thought they knew about Stalinism led them to misunderstand or miscalculate when dealing with fascism.

Hellbeck, by contrast, finds that the study underplays “the divergent aims of the two regimes and the distinct forms of individual commitment they fostered.” The examples he gives are a juxtaposition between 1931 and 1941 and the competition among Einsatzgruppen commandos for reporting higher victim counts in the early stages of the “Holocaust by bullets.” Both these examples are ephemeral to the main vectors of interpretation. But they vividly demonstrate the degree to which Hellbeck remains invested in global comparisons and the primacy of ideology (as channeled through “subjectivizing practices”), two main features of the old debates over totalitarianism and the “lesser evil.”

Hellbeck writes: “David-Fox claims the leaders of Einsatzgruppe B operated in a spirit of fulfilling—and overfulfilling—plans modeled on Stalinist purges. Yet no evidence suggests that German commandos randomly rounded up victims to meet quotas, as Soviet organs did in 1937.”Footnote ¹ To be honest, reading this passage raised serious doubts in my mind about Hellbeck’s method of reading texts: he found what he imagined or apparently wanted to see. My own original contribution to the history of the Einsatzgruppen, which I hope along with other parts of the book will speak directly to specialists studying Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, has to do with Einsatzgruppe B’s neglected role in setting up local occupation regimes. The presentation of the competition among different Einsatzgruppen units and their feedback loop with Berlin, by contrast, was based on specific evidence in specialized chapters and articles by Alex J. Kay, Christian Gerlach, and Jürgen Matthäus, all of which were cited in the notes. When analyzed in terms of power relations, it suggests a dynamic in which subordinates’ zeal to respond to the center drove the escalation of political violence. Only in that basic pattern of intense pressure from above and escalation or overfulfillment by perpetrators in the killing fields was there a parallel with Stalinism. Nowhere in Ch. 5’s sections on the Einsatzgruppen is there any mention of 1937, or quotas, or randomness in rounding up victims, not to mention the absurd notion of German plans “modeled” on Stalinist purges. Hellbeck’s reading of the text is baffling.

In the chapter on collectivization, I noted how some collectivizers called kulaks a “breed,” called for their total extermination, humiliated them by forcing them to dance during church closures, and even declared “we will make soap out of kulaks.” Hellbeck asks: “what precisely is the claim here?” He then supplies possible answers: “That Soviet violence foreshadowed Nazi violence?” No: the early chapters’ sections on National Socialism and Nazi-Soviet entanglements between 1919 and 1933 illustrate perfectly well that I am no Ernst Nolte. Or: “That the dekulakized should be seen as analogous to the Jews?” How could Hellbeck imagine that as a possible conclusion? Perhaps the answer can be found in his statement about the global Nazi-Stalinist comparison and the primacy of ideology: “Such analogies obscure the profound enmity between the two regimes—one championing a master race, the other proclaiming an ideology of universalism and interracial solidarity.”Footnote ²

Leaving aside Hellbeck’s hypotheticals, my own actual claim about the analogy is stated in the very same paragraph as the soap (72): “it was entirely possible for the social or class category, as well as the ‘backwardness’ of peasant culture, to function in similar ways as race and ethnicity in other forms of repression.” In other words, both these differing ideologies and differing approaches to mass violence could produce a profound dehumanization on the part of zealots and perpetrators. Second, the chapter discusses how some victims of dekulakization, notably the resilient survivor Anna Tsetkova with whom the chapter began, themselves perceived striking parallels between Soviet and German mass violence. Finally, the book makes the case more generally that we cannot fully understand rural Smolensk under German occupation without factoring in numerous direct links with the era of collectivization.

My book juxtaposes Nazism and Stalinism and explores their entanglements in one locale, seeking the place where local and regional history meet the grand narrative. It is not obsessed with global comparisons that would, in any case, hardly be possible to ground in the history of one largely rural region that played very different roles in both orders. But in many years of thinking, teaching, and writing about this major comparison that animated so many intellectual and scholarly debates from the mid-twentieth century on, I have become attuned to the tension between finding certain underlying common denominators and reckoning with specific differences large and small. Osokina, for example, discusses how the book treats differences between the two ideologies, and Burzlaff perceives how any “anatomy of power” involves “something far more difficult—and far more necessary—than flattened comparisons and moral equivalency.”Footnote ³ Readers of the book will notice concerted efforts not to obscure differences even when drawing parallels, whether it be in terms of power relations, ideologies, political systems, gender orders, or culture.

None of the commentators mention the original prism the book offers to situate the trajectories, clash, and interactions of these two regimes. Michael Mann aptly described both Stalinism and Nazism as regimes of permanent revolution, even as historians of the Third Reich have by and large been resistant to treating Nazism as a genuine revolution of the Right. But accepting the Nazis’ self-understanding as revolutionaries has implications: the field of comparative revolutions points to the central importance of stages and phases in revolutionary trajectories.Footnote ⁴ At the moment of their greatest clash, the Stalin and Nazi revolutions stood at very different points in their life cycles. National Socialism, a far-right revolution in which the soldier was the New Man, reached the apex of its radicalization in the wake of August 22, 1941, while the war accelerated the mutation of Stalinism into a bizarre revolutionary-reactionary hybrid. Readers of my book’s latter chapters, contra Hellbeck, will find just how much the work describes the war as significantly transforming Stalinism.

It was disturbing to read Hellbeck’s judgement in the context of dekulakization that Soviet “fears of class enemies” were “rooted in reality,” drawing a binary distinction with the Jewish enemy as “a phantom of the Nazi conspiratorial imagination.” Stalinism invented phantasmagorical enemies all the time. Indeed, the invented nexus between internal and external class enemies that lay at its very core was profoundly conspiratorial. Peasant resistance to the brutal seizure of land, cattle, and property to create disastrously underproductive collective farms was indeed massive. But Stalin and the Stalinist extraction state not only branded them enemies in the first place, but characteristically doubled and tripled down on persecuting those enemies it conjured into being. At the same time, Stalinism’s revolutionary energies were mainly directed toward internal colonization, whereas Nazism in the east was bent on external conquest, racial colonization, domination, and genocide. This one issue, not untypically, at once reveals certain underlying similarities between two extreme cataclysms of revolutionary-statist violence as well as a range of concrete differences.

A Focus on Power

Hellbeck believes that the book’s focus on power is constraining as well as enabling, while Osokina observes that the economic dimension of power is not nearly as well developed as other aspects. I do not disagree. Although Lucien Febvre’s concept of histoire totale aimed at integrating the study of political systems with economy and society, environment, and mentalities, in reality total history can never be achieved. By necessity and design I had to make many choices of my own.

By way of analogy, my subjects and narrative required excursions into military history and the history of the Red Army, legal history and trial testimony, as well as agriculture, rurality, and peasant studies. Unlike the colonial archive or the records on slavery, which often require parsing of documentary fragments, Soviet power created an archive of excess. I was attempting to integrate Soviet and German records on a region that in its post-1937 borders was over twice the size of Belgium, or half the size of South Korea. Because, for example, so many other scholars have been immersed in the extremely voluminous records of Soviet trials, I was very selective in my excursions into legal history. In the economic realm in this very rural area, I focused within the overall analysis on making targeted contributions to the history of agriculture and post-1943 reconstruction. I was prompted in this direction by the high-level documentation I was able to access on those two areas as well as major insufficiencies in recent decades in the history of the Soviet-era peasantry.

None of that means, of course, that we can understand Stalinism without integrating economic history, as Osokina has helped us so much to do with her own works. The same is true for the role of economic factors in German racial colonization and the Shoah. I appreciate Osokina’s exposition of the economic topics the book touched upon, especially since it allowed her so productively to extend the “conceptual implications of the economic narrative presented in the book.”

By way of response I would raise the following issues. First, given the pervasiveness of topics directly relating to power in the study of a regime known as sovetskaia vlastʹ—not just power politics, state capacity, coercion and violence, and mass mobilization, but also such areas as discipline, sexuality, and the force of culture, material incentives, ideology, and propaganda—it is startling to see how few studies have made power itself into a primary conceptual focus. I am pleased that my work suggested to Osokina the endeavor of expanding this inquiry into an explicitly interpretive as well as empirically based exploration of the economic dimensions of power, especially one that would include grassroots economic activity at the most local level.

Second, my approach to ideology, which is an issue I have written about and take seriously both here and in all my work on Soviet history, is to interpret it as it intersects with other factors in people’s lives and other forces in historical interpretation, not to isolate it or make it into the primary category of analysis.Footnote ⁵ This approach can been seen in how the book treats material incentives and personal property, rations and hunger, and calories in topics ranging from the 25,000ers during collectivization to the quest for survival during the war.

Finally, Osokina’s observations on the symbiosis between the state-run planned economy with market forces and the black market point not only to the inadequacy of understanding state socialist and capitalist economies as antipodes. Her conclusions equally undermine categorically binary distinctions between regimes of extreme Left and Right.

Archives, Interviews, and Memoirs

Jochen Hellbeck changed the field through his work on diaries from the 1930s and he is a pioneer in the Mints Commission interviews on the war housed in Moscow (NA IRI RAN). It was his work that pointed me to them when they opened in Moscow in the mid-2010s. He is a scholar who has consistently asked the field to reconsider its assumptions, and I am grateful for the chance to explain my own thinking and approach.

When he wrote this commentary, Hellbeck was on the verge of publishing major popular history of the war on the Eastern Front in which citations to Mints Commission interviews at NA IRI RAN or the commission’s affiliate in Kyiv (housed in TsDAHOU) constitute virtually 100 percent of the references to Soviet archival sources (I found one general mention of Ilʹia Erenburg’s fond in RGALI.) In 2018, critiquing Hellbeck’s over-reliance on Mints Commission sources in his earlier work on the Battle of Stalingrad, Oleg Budnitskii dubbed the Mints Commission a “Harvard Project in reverse,” in the sense that it produced the opposite of the anti-Soviet slant of that other very important interview project. (I used both, in conjunction with many other repositories.) The documents generated by both projects feature different yet not insignificant textual problems: in the Academy of Sciences project, we do not have originals but typed transcripts without record of editing or, in most cases, knowledge of the questions asked. Budnitskii warned that they are “one-sided and nonrepresentative.”Footnote ⁶ The Mints Commission interviews represent very valuable sets of sources, but using them alone and uncritically will produce slanted history.

Factoring in how and why repositories are created, as well as the audience and circumstances in which documents and memoirs are made, are basic elements of source criticism. My approach, laid out in the introduction, was not to invoke autobiographical texts in isolation but to interrogate them in conjunction with intensive investigation of their contexts. Highly politicized Stalin-era archival sources need to be read against the grain. They also need to be read in terms of what they say about the state and their creators, which in the context of the colonial archive, Ann Stoler called “along the archival grain.” Yet even an integration of those two modes is insufficient. These difficult sources demand attention to what they leave out and what they only hint at. To invoke Cristina Vatulescu’s musical analogy, they need to be read not as a unified chorus but polyphonically, by which she means attending to the “many voices, silences, and ‘low frequencies’ haunting the archives and the many voices, silences, noises, and their in-betweens that we carry within us.”Footnote ⁷ They should prompt us to reflect on our own assumptions.

In a variation of the interpretation he essentially restates here, in 2018 Hellbeck used the notion of an “anti-fascist pact” that was “jointly negotiated” after German occupation between the returning Soviet authorities and liberated Soviet citizens, whose interviews constituted “self-constituting work, moulding the speaker into a distinctly Soviet person.” This treats newly liberated Soviets stretching from Ukraine and Crimea to Belarus and the Russian Federation, in a term repeated in the article, as a more or less unified “chorus.”Footnote ⁸ In this context, I should note that Crucibles takes issue with the sheer scale of Hellbeck’s notion of a single Soviet “subjectivity” (14).

A chorus follows a musical score and sings in harmony or in one voice, as in a Greek chorus. This makes it an apt term to contrast with my own conception, in which sometimes actions speak louder than words and context always informs text. As my book shows, the local population was deeply divided, and a virtual civil war raged for over two years in the Smolensk countryside, as a wide array of partisan units ranged from marauding and living off the land to conducting a sustained reign of terror against collaborators.

Interestingly, Hellbeck omits a protagonist (the book featured about a dozen, not three) whose Mints Commission interview stands as the single most extraordinary document among the 70 from Smolensk region: Liudmila Madziuk, a Komsomol activist who along with other courageous young women of the 1930s generation organized the first underground Komsomol cell in occupied Smolensk. I was able to develop her into a character in the book because I had access not just to her December 14, 1943 Mints Commission interview but her own and other occupation-era reports from the Komsomol archive. She along with many other sources suggest that the hungry Smolensk urban population as a whole was receptive to German antisemitism and heavily anti-Soviet.

In sum, we must consider the fraught context and unequal power relations at the moment of re-Sovietization, when a range of authorities returned to take testimonies at the same time they investigated those who betrayed the Motherland. That said, my work agrees with Hellbeck to the extent that it argues, as Osokina noted, that the years of occupation did witness a significant shift in popular attitudes due to unprecedented German violence and humiliation of the population.

Ultimately, Hellbeck’s accusation that I read history backwards appears as a justification for using Isaak Mints’s interview project to serve as the primary source base for understanding Soviet people on the Eastern Front. It is a welcome accomplishment that he and his team of researchers have made the original documents of these interviews available online. However, if their ready accessibility leads to other sources remaining unconsidered, this will produce a “forced perspective” in which “scale, proportion, and causality become jointly distorted.”Footnote ⁹

Interviews about the occupation (which, except for the 1942 partisan interviews, looked back after the point of the Soviet victorious return) cannot fully capture biographical logics. Vasilii Maslennikov wrote after the war, but it is important that he was not writing for publication. His locally published text, which he reportedly worked on over the postwar decades, came out posthumously in a print run of 300 (one of which is in the Library of Congress). Maslennikov represents an extraordinarily rare memoirist of peasant origin reflecting on the transformation of his own village and himself over the rockiest stretch of the twentieth century. Much of what he came to understand about his life and fate became meaningful to him over time, while just as much had to be pulled out from between the lines. Small wonder Burzlaff and Krylova were struck by his account. Behind my interpretation of Boris Menʹshagin’s memoirs stands a densely annotated documentary publication of over 800 pages, to which I contributed.Footnote ¹⁰ I invite all interested readers to read these remarkable memoirs for themselves and to then judge my critical contextualizations of them.

Agency, Choice, and Decision-Making

I would have almost certainly refined my presentation of these three concepts and their interrelationship in Crucibles of Power had I been able to read two works before publication: Sophia Rosenfeld’s 2025 Age of Choice and Anna Krylova’s rather profound insights about my work in this forum. What I would like to do now is take Krylova up her invitation to think through the problem of agency for writing new histories of Stalinism.

I am in full accord that historians have come to invoke agency in “unprecedentedly capacious” ways, as Krylova argued in “Agency and History.” I would go further and say that in Soviet history, agency has often come to be invoked as a positive trait of whatever group an author is studying, so as to proudly claim: my people were important, they were influential, they had agency! This appears as a reconfiguration of the claims of causal forces “from below” attributed to social groups in the social history of the 1970s and 80s. Agency becomes, in Krylova’s words, a kind of “entitlement,” one that is often associated with resistance.Footnote ¹¹ This type of “agency” is naively ascribed by the historian without any explicit consideration of “structure.”

This is precisely why my book on first mention asserts that agency will be treated as “always intertwined” with “constraints and pressures” (9). My deliberate intent, albeit signaled in this muted way, was always to explore structure and agency in tandem in order to transcend their conceptual opposition. Furthermore, one of my preoccupations was to suggest how lack of resistance, indecision, or simply doing nothing could be interpreted as a kind of choice. I devoted an entire chapter to collaborationism in the Smolensk region in which it becomes clear that conforming and actively collaborating as well as resisting leads us into considerations of agency.Footnote ¹²

I would push back on the assertion, however, that agency represents the work’s “principal analytics.” Agency was invoked at the outset precisely to connect my analysis with the major debates in the human sciences Krylova engages, but the book uses the word itself very sparingly. The book turns to the term “decision-making” as a less overburdened way of discussing biographies. My main challenge, as I saw it, was attempting to convey on the basis of available sources insights into how decision-making unfolded (hence the insistence on contexts as well as texts, actions as well as words). I raised the issue of agency not to celebrate that people possessed it, but to explore the multiple pressures and factors involved as people made often fateful decisions. The second reference to agency in the book (17) therefore evokes its “tragic” dimensions in the context of the work’s two crucibles of power, setting up a later discussion of the sociologist Jeffrey K. Hass’s notion of compelled or tragic agency.Footnote ¹³ In radically extreme conditions, all available choices can be horrific. Yet people make them nonetheless.

This approach was encapsulated in the notion of “biographical logics,” which by their very nature cannot revolve around agency alone. In this conception, rather, decisions are embedded in processes, contingencies, and trajectories—all of which, moreover, may sometimes only be intuited, dimly perceived, or not articulated by historical actors themselves. The book’s incorporation of the problem of agency into this broader rubric of biographical logics is why, I believe, Burzlaff wrote: “Rather than probing whether people had agency, David-Fox asks how they used the situational agency available to them: how decisions emerged not from the classic liberal notions of free will or pure constraint, but from prior affiliations, material needs, and the changing horizons of possibility.”Footnote ¹⁴

In her own discussion of agency, Krylova raised the problem of the “not-knowing actor” as a way of raising far-reaching questions about what she calls here the “rubric of agentic intent.” To me, her less than rational actor seems very much in accord with my attempts to capture misunderstandings and address the thorny question of what actors did not or could not know. For example, two physicians who experienced a German POW starvation camp near Viazʹma, A.S. Pogrebnev and P.P. Erpylov, grappled in their Mints Commission interview with how to convey unprecedented forms of Nazi violence at a time when the very concepts of genocide, the Holocaust, or crimes against humanity had not yet been invented (179–80).

As for “choice”: writing about a place not only “far from Moscow” but very far from liberalism, I introduced it as a synonym for decision-making in the context of the concept of “choiceless choice” introduced by Lawrence Langer in Holocaust studies. Langer’s “dilemma of choice” was in many ways instantiated by Evgeny Finkel’s harrowing discussion of the Jewish leadership of ghettos. His work, subtitled “choice and survival during the Holocaust,” was perhaps most influential for me when I decided to speak about choice.Footnote ¹⁵

I was hardly unaware that “choice” forms a major part of the history and ideology of political liberalism and consumer capitalism. After all, I grew up in the land of Baskin Robbins and its incredible variety of ice-cream flavors (all of them mediocre). By the late twentieth century, Sophia Rosenfeld shows, the “right to choose” became but one prominent feature of what she calls western modernity’s “Age of Choice.” Her study demonstrates how a primacy of choice came to the fore after the eighteenth century in historically contingent ways, pushed forward over time not merely by political theory but by social practices. What seems noteworthy for this discussion is that Soviet modernity created its own specific and highly distinctive social practices. A challenging question for future investigations relates to how illiberal social practices—and, yes, the multi-leveled power of the party-state—shaped conceptions of choice in ways that must be accounted for in our own historical understandings of agency.