The Last Days of Stalin

The Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies
The Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in
Russian and East European Studies

Joshua Rubenstein was an organizer and regional director for Amnesty International USA for 37 years. He has written about Soviet dissent and the Holocaust in German-Occupied Soviet territory. Among his most renown books are his biography of the controversial Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, entitled Tangled Loyalties; Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which received a National Jewish Book Award; and a concise, interpretive biography of Leon Trotsky, which is part of the Jewish Lives Series of Yale University Press. The Last Days of Stalin is his tenth book. It will appear in Azeri, Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Portuguese, Polish, and Ukrainian editions.

The Last Days of Stalin takes us back to the second half of 1952 when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin’s murderous regime. He was poised to challenge the newly elected US President Dwight Eisenhower with armed force, and was broadening a vicious campaign against Soviet Jews. Stalin’s sudden collapse and death in March 1953 was as dramatic and mysterious as his life. It is no overstatement to say that his passing marked a major turning point in the twentieth century. But after Stalin’s death, the overly cautious response by the Eisenhower administration to the Kremlin’s conciliatory gestures  missed an opportunity to significantly reduce the tensions of the Cold War. 

A lecture by the author Joshua Rubenstein

Associate of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Associate Director for major gifts at Harvard Law School
With the publication of the Hebrew edition of
The Last Days of Stalin
 

Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 18:00-20:00

Tel Aviv University, Gilman Bldg., Rm. 458

*The Lecture will be in English