Noam Chomsky pointed out when he was observing the role of the press during the Vietnam War, that it had a significant role to play in atrocities. The job of print and broadcast media, he argued, was to legitimise and explain away mass killings and to tell the story of why they were necessary. LookingContinue reading “Pravda and Stalin’s Terror”
Tag Archives: what were the purges
Stalin and HG Wells
Here is another article from the archives, one that I enjoyed writing some years ago on my teaching blog: Ok, so this might be useful for teachers of modern Britain (1930s) and teachers of Soviet Russia. In the early 1930s the USSR had a complex relationship with western intellectuals, it has been described by historianContinue reading “Stalin and HG Wells”
Everyday life and terror – 1937
What often gets overlooked in the examination of the great terror (and other 20th Century terrors) is the experience of ordinary people and their thoughts, fears and survival strategies. During the Cold War an immense amount of scholarship went into fathoming the internal workings of the soviet state and the reasoning of Stalin and hisContinue reading “Everyday life and terror – 1937”
Stalin and the Gulags
Here I address the question as the the economic rationale behind the Gulag system and its dismantling after the Stalin era.
Explaining History Podcast 