A Symposium on the Problems of Stalinism, 3rd -4th September 2010
Call for Papers
The Aleksanteri Institute is arranging a symposium on the phenomenon of Stalinism in Helsinki in September 3.—4. 9. 2010. In recent times, the discussions about the nature of the Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union from the 1930’s to the 1950’s and the impacts of Stalinism in the international agenda have been resurfacing, no doubt partly because the end of the Cold War and the demise of ideological clichés connected with it, partly thanks to the opening of Soviet archives, which makes the concrete assessment of Stalinist policy and the amount of its victims more reliable.
The ”totalitarianism theory”, which a long time was, in particular during the Cold War, the dominating explanation of the Stalinism phenomenon, has been increasingly criticized as insufficient and superficial, although it undoubtedly did grasp some aspects of the Stalin regime. However, no consensus as regards to the causal and historical explanation of Stalinism has yet been achieved. Instead, there are many concurring interpretations, starting from the heterodox Marxist attempts to interpret the USSR of the Stalin period as a ”state capitalist” or ”developmental” dictatorship, to recent American analyses of Stalinism as a form of civilization sui generis.
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