The Fractured Reality of Power

One of Crucibles of Power’s most lasting contributions is its redefinition of power as a social process. Michael David-Fox resists the urge to frame Stalinist and Nazi authority as totalizing structures, revealing how power in Smolensk was fractured, improvised, and constantly negotiated. David-Fox traces this arc from the Smolensk Affair of 1928—a regional scandal-turned-purge that revealed the performative dimensions of Stalinist justice—to the political cleansing that followed Soviet reoccupation in 1943 and beyond. In this world, repression ricocheted: the same Soviet bureaucrat purged in 1937 reappears as a Nazi collaborator in 1941, and a partisan commander who hunted Germans in 1943 is installed as a Soviet functionary in 1944, wielding the same instruments of fear he once opposed. Few figures illustrate this better than Boris Menshagin, the Soviet defense lawyer turned Nazi-appointed mayor who embodies the structural product of overlapping regimes. Power, for him and many others, was warped by proximity to danger, reshaped with each front line, and refracted through choices made at desks, in barracks, and behind kitchen doors.

This reframing decisively breaks with three major paradigms. First, it puts Cold War-era totalitarian models to rest, replacing top-down control with a porous, adaptive matrix of governance.Footnote ⁵ David-Fox builds on traditions of political and institutional history—Stephen Kotkin’s work on power, Jan T. Gross’s analysis of the privatization of violence, and recent literatures on collaboration and wartime society—while also engaging questions of grievance, competition, and local initiative.Footnote ⁶ He also shows how those same dynamics extended into the wartime and postwar years. The analysis of bezvlastie—the power vacuum in the wake of the Nazi invasion—captures this paradox brilliantly. In this moment of shattered sovereignty, the old Stalinist strategies of rumor, bribery, and opportunism did not disappear—they metastasized. Second, the book moves past the carefully staged dualism of Stalinism and Nazism, which were rarely allowed to bleed into one another.Footnote ⁷ The Smolensk Affair thus appears as a precedent: local power was reshuffled through staged revelations, performative justice, and denunciation networks—tools later echoed in Nazi occupation and re-Sovietization alike. Third, David-Fox offers a necessary corrective to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, which mapped overlapping violence but left the machinery of rule at the local level—its petty rivalries, improvisations, and local instabilities—largely untouched.Footnote ⁸ David-Fox’s strength lies in replacing abstract frameworks with what one could call a social history of entanglement. In Smolensk, Nazi and Soviet systems overlapped, echoed, and contaminated one another. What we are given is a rare narrative: a multi-regime history of Soviet coercion, Nazi improvisation, and ambiguous moments of fear, ambition, and adaptation. For this alone, and for rejecting revisionist accounts that either downplay Soviet violence or reframe collaboration as nationalist virtue, we owe David-Fox a rare kind of gratitude.Footnote ⁹

Yet in my view, the book’s best conceptual contribution is the notion of “biographical logics.” 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 ¹⁰ Take the Maslennikov family: three siblings, raised under the same roof, end up on opposite sides of the war: one a partisan, one a translator for the Germans, and one an NKVD agent. Another is Isaak Breitman, a Jewish communist who survives the Holocaust by posing as a Ukrainian and entering Nazi auxiliary service. These are stories of improvisation in a world where no decision was made in isolation, and every path carried the weight of past ties and uncertain futures. Crucibles of Power implicitly critiques the deterministic tendencies of recent work, which rightly emphasizes the impact of Soviet rule on wartime behaviors but often risk portraying those influences as fixed.Footnote ¹¹ Instead, David-Fox tells a story not of cause and effect, but of personnel, memory, and opportunism carrying violence forward. Soviet power was not swept away in 1941, nor cleanly restored in 1944: it bled across regimes, surviving in habits, categories, and decisions.

Violence as a System

As a historian of the victims of mass violence, I also read Crucibles of Power through a second lens: the voices that flinch from the archive—Jewish survivors, women navigating coercion, and civilians caught in the blur between denunciation and complicity. What I found was an excellent mapping of calibrated and reenacted violence: a milkmaid testifies that a veterinarian has sabotaged a cow’s milk yield (Ch. 3); gas vans roll into Smolensk to test their killing efficiency before deployment to Auschwitz (Ch. 5); and women who exchanged sex for food or safety are later branded “German mattresses” and executed by partisans (Ch. 8). The book’s insistence on scenes like these gives voice—however belated—to those who experienced it. David-Fox brings extraordinary precision to the local workings of total war, tracing how individuals became agents of harm, witnesses to it, or its collateral, and how the categories between them could collapse.

The Holocaust is thus treated with exceptional clarity. The liquidation of the Smolensk ghetto on July 15–16, 1942, is framed as central to the regime’s vision of “order.” In Smolensk, the extermination of Jews was not a distinct policy running parallel to anti-partisan warfare—it was fused with it.Footnote ¹² Chapter 6 chillingly reconstructs how Wehrmacht officers came to see Jews and Soviet resisters as a single, indistinguishable enemy: the Judeo-Bolshevik partisan. In this logic, ghetto liquidation, rural massacres, and counterinsurgency became mutually reinforcing.Footnote ¹³ The death marches from Viazma and Roslavl—where prisoners were shot, starved, or abandoned—underscore the geographic reach and logistical brutality of German rule. We also see how Nazi authorities co-opted local forms of repression, such as Komandanty ulits (street commandants) and politsai (auxiliary police) as inheritors of Soviet surveillance routines. The line between racial colonization and extermination policy was so thin as to become meaningless, and it is one of the book’s core merits that it tells this story outside major Holocaust narratives.Footnote ¹⁴

Futures of Comparison, Fields of Violence

What emerges, then, is not a story of regime succession but of layered rule: a form of governance shaped not just by ideology or repression, but by improvisation, institutional memory, and the entanglement of violence across time. It is a vision of Soviet and Nazi power as uneven terrain, one that resists neat comparisons but invites new ones. What might such a framework reveal in territories of old Soviet rule, the multiethnic borderlands annexed after 1939, and contested sovereignty in interwar Poland, wartime Yugoslavia, or postwar Romania?Footnote ¹⁵ I believe these questions will allow us to reevaluate Soviet rule under conditions of collapse, occupation, and return. David-Fox is also unflinching in his treatment of sexual violence, structurally embedded in Nazi rule and deeply tied to racial hierarchy, militarized masculinity, and occupation economies. Like Anna Hájková, who has called for a history of sex work under Nazi rule, David-Fox invites us to take these economies seriously.Footnote ¹⁶ In occupied Smolensk, to share a bed with a German could mean food, heat, and survival; but it also meant visibility, rumor, and sometimes execution. Clearly, the performative dimensions of violence—photographs of rape, staged killings, mass spectacles—were not limited to the front lines.Footnote ¹⁷ They spilled into homes, village squares, and postwar memories, calling for more case studies and comparative research.

What gives Crucibles of Power its particular weight for readers of this journal, however, is its sensitivity to how Stalinist violence shaped wartime events. The 1930s were a training ground: denunciation networks, purges, and ideological performance created habits that outlived the regime. The Deduška Regiment, composed of up to 80% escaped Soviet POWs, is emblematic: an anti- Nazi unit born from Stalinist militarism. We now need systematic comparisons of this mechanism—subtle, cumulative—for communities across Soviet territories and beyond. To what extent were initial pro-German sympathies and help offered to persecuted minorities shaped by prior experiences under Soviet rule? Did other cities and regions with prior exposure to Stalinist violence, collectivization, and purges in the 1930s see similar or different patterns of flight, compliance, or refusal?Footnote ¹⁸ This book on Smolensk, a provocative lens chosen for analytical leverage, calls for collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts to trace these patterns of violence across space and time.Footnote ¹⁹ Finally, it invites us to write comparative histories of emotions.Footnote ²⁰ Fear is everywhere in this book: fear of denunciation, of silence, of being left behind or pulled in. In an article just published, I argue that fear was both scar tissue and armor in the multiethnic Polish borderlands (kresy).Footnote ²¹ David-Fox offers a solid foundation for future histories of fear, hope, shame, and desire as agents of violence lived, remembered, and reproduced. With Crucibles of Power, we are no longer asked to compare from above, but rather from below, from within, and from the middle of a fractured world.

Ultimately, David-Fox offers a quiet yet powerful warning about authoritarianism in our own century. Read against the present, the book shows us that such regimes rarely impose themselves fully formed; they are assembled, inhabited, and naturalized through denunciation cultures, bureaucratic improvisation, and the recycling of personnel. With archival dexterity and narrative control—slow, precise history in the service of difficult truths—David-Fox has written an urgent book about multidirectional entanglement. His Smolensk is a city where oppression and resistance coexisted, where victims could become perpetrators, and where ideology often bent under the weight of pragmatism. For all scholars of Eastern Europe, Crucibles of Power is a mandatory read: a devastatingly intelligent, layered, and much-needed intervention in our understanding of Stalinism, Nazism, and the lived experiences of World War II. It is not an easy book, nor should it be. Some histories should leave us unsettled.