Merle Fainsod’s sole misgiving about the records of the Smolensk oblast party committee archive, which he discovered in the National Archives in 1954, was Smolensk’s provincial stature. As a rural region far from Moscow, it seemed an unlikely site for the study of power, which Fainsod situated centrally in the Kremlin. Yet his exploration proved revelatory. On an empirical level, he demonstrated that power relations in the Soviet state did not simply follow the top-down levers of control assumed by the then-dominant totalitarian model. Internal Party correspondence and reports revealed tensions between provincial officials and the central leadership, along with a great deal of manipulation by local actors. Fainsod’s findings opened the door to “revisionist” historians who emphasized negotiation and agency within authoritarian structures. In turn, post-revisionist scholars placed ideology at the heart of questions of identity and self-identification in the Stalinist universe.

Returning to Fainsod’s work while setting aside some recent historiographical debates, Michael David-Fox renders Smolensk centrally relevant. Fainsod’s study ended in the mid-1930s, where his archival trail ran dry. With access to much broader holdings, David-Fox traces Smolensk’s history across the prewar, wartime, and postwar decades, offering multiple new insights. At every stage, he suggests, Smolensk mattered to both Soviet and European history. The purge of the Smolensk party organization in 1928 paralleled the Shakhty affair, together launching Stalin’s assault on the Soviet social and economic order. The state repeated this assault in 1937, mobilizing grassroots communists against their regional bosses. Situated on the highway from Minsk to Moscow, Smolensk became a strategic stronghold when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, witnessing fierce counterattacks that confounded the Wehrmacht (the story of these counterattacks the book does not tell).Footnote ¹ After the Nazi occupation began, Smolensk served as both a key German economic base and the headquarters of Einsatzgruppe B, one of three major SS death squads. This unit even fielded an advance detachment, “Vorkommando Moskau,” tasked with preparing the elimination of the Bolshevik center. Where Fainsod saw a provincial backwater, David-Fox situates Smolensk within the shatter zones of Stalinism, Nazism, and the Second World War, using it to tell a new history of Soviet and Nazi mass destruction.

The author characterizes his book as a “new kind of entangled history: instead of studying Stalinism, Nazism, the Eastern Front in World War II, or the Holocaust separately, I seek out the insights to be had from bringing them all into a single frame” (10). He explores the interaction of Stalinism and Nazism over time, centrally asking “how people in a largely Russian region made decisions, acted, and reacted under two alternating, radically illiberal regimes of the far Left and Right” (10). Ultimately, his inquiry into individuals’ “experiences and agency, however limited and however tragic,” aims to provide “very concrete examples of power relations” on the ground. These, in turn, address what he calls “the Sphinx’s riddle of all social and political inquiries: the nature of power itself” (17-18).

David-Fox’s choice of a single frame to integrate the histories and historiographies of Stalinism, Nazism, and the Holocaust is ingenious. Upending conventional divisions between prewar, wartime, and postwar, between Soviet and German, totalitarianism and the Holocaust, and bringing together previously separated bodies of historical writings, Crucibles of Power furnishes a richly documented micro-study of a Russian province under the iterative stages of Soviet, Nazi, and then again Soviet rule. This sweeping move opens the door wide for future scholarship. Yet the simultaneous reliance on a single driving force—power, rippling through the lives of central, regional, and local actors and forcing them to scramble for survival and leverage—also constrains the book. It leads David-Fox to underplay the divergent aims of the two regimes and the distinct forms of individual commitment they fostered, despite their shared dictatorial features and extreme violence.

Crucibles of Power emphasizes the kinship of Stalinism and Nazism as “parallel yet divergent drives of internal and external colonization” (29). Both unleashed massive political violence—whether to transform Soviet society or to build out a Germanic empire in the east, whether by targeting class or racial enemies. Both waged war, David-Fox argues, driven by deep-seated ideological assumptions about how entire groups, whether anti-Soviet or “Judeo-Bolshevik,” would act politically. But here lay a crucial difference: Soviet fears of class enemies were rooted in reality, as many former dekulakized peasants harbored grievances and were readily installed by the Germans as village elders or policemen. The Jewish enemy, by contrast, was a phantom of the Nazi conspiratorial imagination.

Some parallels the book draws are not borne out by the record. For example, David-Fox claims the leaders of Einsatzgruppe B operated in a spirit of fulfilling—and overfulfilling—plans modeled on Stalinist purges. Yet no evidence suggests that German commandos randomly rounded up victims to meet quotas, as Soviet organs did in 1937. Nazi racial violence, though unsparing, was selective. Similarly, David-Fox highlights “striking parallels” between Soviet collectivizers who demeaned peasants and German occupiers whose racialized violence humiliated “backward” Russians. He even suggests an eerie anticipation of antisemitic rituals, noting Soviet collectivizers who forced peasants to dance during church closures. “As in the Holocaust a decade later,” he writes, “expropriating the property of the victims became centrally caught up with the political violence” (71). But what precisely is the claim here? That Soviet violence foreshadowed Nazi violence? That the dekulakized should be seen as analogous to the Jews? Such analogies obscure the profound enmity between the two regimes—one championing a master race, the other proclaiming an ideology of universalism and interracial solidarity. After all, Operation Barbarossa sought nothing less than the eradication of Soviet communism, cast by the Nazis as a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. “Vorkommando Moskau” was stationed in Smolensk for a reason.Footnote ²

David-Fox highlights the life stories of many inhabitants of the Smolensk region as they endured Soviet, Nazi, and then again Soviet rule. Yet how these individuals made sense of their lives at critical junctures is not rendered sufficiently clear. His three main protagonists illustrate the problem. Vasilii Maslennikov, a communist from a Smolensk village, was captured, deported to Germany as a slave laborer, and later punished again by the Soviet regime for presumed collaboration. Relying exclusively on Maslennikov’s memoirs, written long after the war, David-Fox presents him as a disillusioned critic of both Stalinism and Nazism. But is it apt to describe as a lifelong “peasant intellectual without a cause” (18) an ardent Komsomol activist who broke with village traditions, joined the Party, and had just been appointed a communist lecturer in 1941? The second figure, Boris Menʹshagin, a lawyer who became mayor of Smolensk under German occupation, remains enigmatic. David-Fox bases his account chiefly on Menʹshagin’s memoir, which he dictated onto a tape recorder following his release from a 25-year term in a Soviet prison. In his memoirs, Menʹshagin claimed to have served both Soviets and Nazis from the same moral impulse to help people. While highlighting his protagonist’s phenomenal memory for names, events, and dates, David-Fox also notes that in recording his memoirs, Menʹshagin acted like a good defense lawyer who had to be at once convincing and selective in his presentation. Keen to deny Soviet accusations that he oversaw all occupation-era activities in Smolensk, he omitted any mention of his dealings with leaders of Einsatzgruppe B, contacts he surely had. These critical remarks are helpful only to a point, for to understand better how Menʹshagin acted and thought under German occupation, one would need to set his memoir against Soviet intelligence and prosecutorial records, as well as German documents attesting to his role, sources absent from the book. The third protagonist, the communist Andrei Iudenkov, is described as “stymied and frustrated in his ambitions before the war,” (14) and in 1941 as “gambling on the nascent partisan underground” (147) to find a new life in the forests. Yet “gambling” is an odd word choice for a communist, and one seemingly unsupported in Iudenkov’s rich record from the time of the war, which includes a personal account written “for myself personally” (15) in the forests in 1942, and an interview he gave to Soviet historians in 1943.

David-Fox says that the discovery of seventy interviews conducted by Isaak Mints’s wartime commission with Smolensk residents transformed his project.Footnote ³ Surprisingly, the book uses only a handful of these rich testimonies, quoting them sparingly. This may be because they do not support his thesis that people scrambled to adapt to successive regimes. My own reading suggests far more consistency, provided in part by what Holocaust scholar Zoe Waxman calls the “specific logic of testimony.”Footnote ⁴ These interviews consistently identify the Soviet retreat from Smolensk in summer 1941 as a watershed. David-Fox skillfully conveys the resulting atmosphere of chaos and abandonment, as well as moments of opportunity. Virtually every testimony begins with a detailed account of the retreat, coupled with an explanation of why the interviewee was unable to evacuate. The implication is clear: Soviet citizens knew they were expected to resist or flee, and so they cited overpowering circumstances that stopped them in their tracks.

Whatever ambivalence these opening statements suggest, it often vanished once interviewers asked about the German regime of violence. Such stories lie at the heart of many testimonies. Residents of Smolensk were well aware of the Shoah. Some described the fate of their Jewish neighbors with sympathy; others with the foreboding sense that they would be next. Many recalled the shocking sight of Soviet POWs repeatedly marched through the city: columns of emaciated men in rags, on the verge of death. “People on the street stopped to look and asked the prisoners where they were from,” recalled the pediatrician Antonina Semenova. “Everyone peered into their faces, hoping to recognize someone. To all questions they replied only, ‘bread.’ They uttered this one word—‘bread!’ Some were delirious.”Footnote ⁵ Evgeniia Kiuster, a librarian forced to peel potatoes in a German mess kitchen, described the starving POWs in the courtyard: “Their legs were wrapped in rags, and their heads likewise. Filthy, tattered, shabby. It was hard to believe these were our people.” That phrase—“our people”—was crucial, marking her identification with the prisoners and prompting her to recount her own humiliations under German rule, her statement ending with the words: “The Germans did not consider us as human beings.”

Commenting on the behavior of Soviet citizens under Nazi rule, David-Fox remarks that “two decades of Soviet rule and the Great Terror had inculcated the importance of lying low.” This view discounts the many acts of resistance, small and large, recorded in the testimonies collected by the Mints commission. A Smolensk schoolteacher reported that she continued to use uncensored Soviet textbooks in defiance of official orders. She added that students tore out pictures of Hitler and other fascist leaders from German language textbooks. A middle school director told how students dealt with a math teacher who ordered them to reinstall a portrait of Hitler that they had removed. The students “wrote on a scrap of paper ‘traitress’ and pinned it on the teacher’s back. She went out into the street with that paper. The children were satisfied.”Footnote ⁶ As for the partisan movement, Crucibles of Power once more stresses power relations, describing partisan leaders as vengeful apparatchiks (“Stalinism without Stalin”), while discounting not only the fact that they fought back but also the personal grounds that impelled them to do so.

What gets lost from view is how the encounter with Nazism formed a watershed event in Soviet identification and self-identity as Amir Weiner—who is not discussed in this book—was the first western scholar to establish.Footnote ⁷ The war’s subjectivizing thrust permeated the voices of the residents from Smolensk who spoke with historians from the Mints commission. It was in the confluence of two motivational streams that the voices of the Soviet survivors assumed their specific shape: the initiative by the Soviet wartime historians to create for posterity a stenographed record of a distinctly Soviet people’s war, and the desire of the people whom they interviewed to talk about their humiliations and pain suffered under German rule. As the interviewees recalled the horrors, they effectively bespoke their rehumanization in the aftermath of Nazi occupation. In this act, the personal and the political fused, as “humanity” and “humanism” were themselves important tropes in the ongoing Soviet ideological battle against fascism.Footnote ⁸ These conditions of creation of the historical source material are what Waxman urges scholars to include in their analysis of testimony.

In David-Fox’s telling, Stalinist rule in the aftermath of Nazism was much of a repeat of the prewar version, as the state “reintroduced its rituals, official celebrations, newspeak, and, not least, its political expectations” (334). This characterization leaves unexplored how the power dynamics in Smolensk between 1941 and 1943 alternatively rendered people voiceless or amplified their voices: the German occupiers did not address residents from Smolensk as citizens, and they did not seek to document their suffering under Soviet rule, or their eagerness to fight Bolshevism. This is in contrast to the Soviet oral history project, which came along with the heightened duties of Soviet citizenship. Soviet power was crucially recharged in the encounter with German fascism, and its lexicon permanently changed. This was consequential, as can be gleaned from the postwar writings of Andrei Iudenkov, the former partisan leader who became a prolific historian of the partisan movement. But rather than contemplating how antifascism structured Iudenkov’s horizons, David-Fox foregrounds what his protagonist omitted from his official writings: instances of Russian collaboration with the Germans, or the partisans’ brutal reckonings with presumed traitors in their own ranks. David-Fox ends up criticizing Iudenkov for practicing an “anti-humanistic” form of historical writing about a mythical “people’s war” that would continue to have great currency in post-Soviet Russia. Here, as elsewhere in Crucibles of Power, the author’s gaze is retrospective, fed from later outcomes, including sources composed in later years. Ultimately, as he himself points out, David-Fox wrote his book as a critical engagement with the raw military and political power so fully on display in present-day Russia. The risk of such a reading backwards in time is to miss defining ways in which historical actors sized themselves up at crucial junctures in their lives.