Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia

From the first publisher granted access to Stalin’s personal archive, a provocative and insightful portrait of modern Russia—the most compelling since David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb.

The New York Times - Martin Walker

Brent's engaging memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives, reveals as much about the grim realities of post-Soviet life and bureaucracy as it does about the archives themselves. Equipped with little Russian and few contacts, but with an almost palpable sense of decency and honest intentions that illuminate his book, Brent explains for the general reader as well as for specialists how he went about his work in the new Russia.

Jonathan Brent is the editorial director of Yale University Press, where he founded the Annals of Communism series in 1991. He is the coauthor of Stalin's Last Crime, and a frequent contributor to the New Criterion, the Observer, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He teaches Soviet literature and history at Bard College and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.