Abstract:

This paper is drawn from Allen’s 2015 biography of Russian Communist Alexander Shlyapnikov (1885-1937), who as a worker and trade union leader developed criticisms of the Soviet system while he worked within it, fell victim to Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin’s suspicions of former oppositionists, and was internally exiled, arrested, and interrogated, but was unwilling to conform to Stalin’s expectations for public confession of crimes. Allen’s findings challenge the traditional portrayal in history and literature of the Old Bolsheviks’ conception of self and party.

Bio sketch:

Barbara C. Allen is a historian of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union who studies Communist Party politics in Soviet Russia and Ukraine during the 1920s and the dynamics of Stalinist terror against former oppositionists within the Communist Party. She received her PhD from Indiana University Bloomington and is Associate Professor of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her books include Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Brill, 2015 and Haymarket Books 2016), an edited collection of her translations, Leaflets of the Russian Revolution: Socialist Organizing in 1917 (Haymarket Books, 2018), and a forthcoming collection of her translations of the documents of the Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party (Brill/Haymarket). She has been the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, an International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) Individual Advanced Research grant, and grants from the U.S. Department of State, Mellon Foundation, and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Her articles have appeared in the journals Cahiers du Monde Russe, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, and The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, among others. She serves on the Board of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies and the Board of the Pennsylvania Division of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Paperback editions of her books can be found here and here.

The event will take place as a part of the MA colloquium of the History Department online via WebEx on February 1, 2021, 6.15 pm-7.45 pm (Berlin time).

Since the amount of spots is limited, please, register for the event at yulia.maximenkova@fu-berlin.de.