Dr Cynthia Hooper
How did members of the Soviet Communist Party recall the Stalin era and respond to successive, Kremlin-sanctioned retellings of the Soviet past? How did participants in the repressions justify their actions in retrospect? Soviet terror during the 1930s involved an extraordinarily high level of mass mobilization in practices of denunciation, investigation, and surveillance, as well as fl uid, constantly shifting boundaries between "perpetrators" and "victims," prosecution and defence. As a result, offi cials charged with "explaining" the Stalin era, most notably under Nikita Khrushchev, often found themselves at a loss for words. Frequently seeking to simplify the dynamics of past political repression, they argued that virtually everyone had been a prisoner under Stalin and trapped in a coercive system. Yet Communist leaders on the other hand vociferously rejected any possible comparisons between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and the role of the individual in each. How did Soviet leaders and ordinary citizens struggle to distinguish between the two regimes?
Cynthia Hooper is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute and received her Ph.D. in Soviet history from Princeton University in 2003. She was recently awarded a two-year fellowship from the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board to conduct archival research in cities across Russia and is currently preparing her dissertation, Terror from Within: Participation and Coercion in Soviet Power, 1924-1964, for publication. Her academic interests focus on the practice of dictatorship in the modern era, both inside the Soviet Union and throughout Eurasia. Dr Hooper was a Fraenkel prizewinner in 2003.
