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Mark Edele
Mark Edele is the inaugural Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne. An Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2015–19), he is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), and Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army soldiers became Hitler’s collaborators (2017). Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish survival in the Soviet Union, edited with Sheila Fitzpatrick and Atina Grossmann, will be published later this year, and Red Empire: A Short History of the Soviet Union in 2018.
‘What about Lenin do you admire most?’ Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train (2016), answered as most historians would: ‘I can’t think of anything much to admire.’ That this question could be asked at all in 2017 shows that the Russian Revolution continues to fascinate. Such continuities with the mental world of the Cold War are no speciality of the political left, but the ... (read more)
The relationship between science and power is central to many struggles of the present. Politics impinges on science when funding is allocated to ‘applied’ or ‘fundamental’ research, when decisions are reached about what should be taught in schools, when governments determine if people can be forced to vaccinate their children, what kinds of interventions into reproduction are allowable, o ... (read more)
The history of (not so) great men and women, their lovers, wars, and marriages is back. After social historians from the 1970s reduced kings and queens to 'clowns in regal purple', beholden to impersonal social forces 'from below'; after cultural historians from the 1980s onwards elevated 'culture' and 'discourse' instead to movers of history – today the follies, achievements, and crimes of thos ... (read more)
For more than a year and a half the armed conflict in Ukraine has touched many in Australia. On 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in the war zone after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. There was a short burst of jubilation by pro-Russian rebels on social media, before it became clear that this was not a military machine but a civilian airliner. All 283 passengers and fifteen ... (read more)
I first encountered Sheila Fitzpatrick's work in the mid-1990s. The 1986–87 controversy in The Russian Review about how to write a social history of Stalinism was taught as a milestone in the historiography of my field. Instinctively, I took sides against my professors and with Fitzpatrick's call to remove the state from the centre of analysis, a methodological tactic informing much of what I ha ... (read more)
How dissimilar two books on the same topic can be: one expansive and apparently unconstrained by word limits, the other constrained and economical; one following a simple chronological narrative, the other an admirable adaptation of literary techniques of multi-layered story telling. Both are political books, but the politics are as different as the personalities of the authors. Stephen Kotkin is ... (read more)