Understanding Stalinism

I have been thinking about turning this into an "academic blog," although I have been worrying that if I did, I would thus be confronted with my lack of interesting or meaningful things to say. I suppose that without an audience, this matters little in any case, and I can in fact meander along posting pretty much what I want. Freedom.

This week I've been reading Jochen Hellbeck's Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin which is probably the most interesting book I've read on Soviet history in the last year. The main reason I wanted to write about it here is that it seems to me that this is the kind of book which people who are not historians but who want to know something about Stalinism ought to be reading. It is something of a shame that if you go into a (nonspecialist) bookshop or public library looking for books on the Stalin period that are not school or undergraduate textbooks, you will have the choice of buying a general history of the Soviet Union (these aren't bad on the whole), a biography of Stalin (these are also pretty good for what they are) and perhaps some kind of social history (Sheila Fitzpatrick's 'Everyday Stalinism' would be an example on the better side). It seems to me that Hellbeck's book offers an insight into the individual experience of life under Stalin which is unparalleled. This is slightly different from the approach of Catriona Kelly in 'Comrade Pavlick' which is more an interrogation of a famous case and how it played out in an effort to give an insight into Stalinist society. The difference with Hellbeck's book is that he is able to integrate the story of individuals into the story of the whole society in a rather different way - to show that for at least a considerable number of people living in the 1930s Soviet Union, the struggle to make sense of their lives became inextricable from the revolution - the struggle to reach consciousness permeated (it it did not necessarily consume) every element of their lives. And this kind of study gives a much better idea of what it was like for people to live in such a society than yet another investigation of the regime's arbitrariness or the pervasive presence of the NKVD.
In terms of interrogating 'modern subjectivity,' in the Soviet context, the book makes a genuine leap forward, opening up questions which simply have never been asked by historians of this period. In the process, Hellbeck has produced what I believe is one of the most readable and engaging histories of the 1930s published in recent years. It deserves to find a readership far beyond university history departments, and replace books like Sebag-Montefiore's "Stalin: in the court of the Red Tsar" and Anne Appelbaum's "Gulag" as the texts to which people turn when they decide they'd like to know something about Stalinism. (I pick on these two not because they are bad books - they are both ok, in fact - but because they have been extremely popular in recent years). I hope paperback publication is not far off.