Professor of History and International Relations, The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University; Associate, The Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University;  Local Affiliate, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University

Visiting Fellow, Ukraine in European Dialogue
(May – July 2018)

Project:

The End of the True Believers: The Stalinist Purges in Postwar Eastern
Europe

The project creates a topography of the Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe from 1948 to 1953. It stresses the anti-Semitic themes that characterized the proceedings and treats the murderous events in the context of the Soviet-Yugoslav split and Moscow’s reorientation in the Middle East. At the center of this work is the case of Rudolf Slansky, the former secretary general of the Czech Communist Party. I argue that the trigger for his downfall was an intelligence operation code-named “Great Sweeper” that was designed and carried out by OKAPI, a Czech subsidiary of the CIA.

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