On Tuesday, January 31, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation hosted an online event, A Deadly Century: Exploring the Legacy of the USSR 100 Years After Its Creation, during which scholars David Satter, Dr. Paul R. Gregory, and Dr. Sean McMeekin discussed the genesis and creation of the Soviet Union, the role of nationalism, and the events that led to the eventual downfall and collapse of the regime.
About the speakers:
David Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and a long-time observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Mr. Satter graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a B.Litt. degree in political philosophy. He worked for four years as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and, in 1976, he was named Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years, during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the Soviet totalitarian system for posterity. Mr. Satter has written three books about Russia: It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past; Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union; and Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State.
Dr. Paul R. Gregory is a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a Research Professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, holds an endowed professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, and is emeritus chair of the International Advisory Board of the Kyiv School of Economics. Gregory has held visiting teaching appointments at Moscow State University, Viadrina University, and the Free University of Berlin. Having earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of twelve books and more than one hundred articles on economic history, the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography. Gregory also served on the editorial board of The History of the Stalin Gulag, a seven-volume documentary series published jointly by the Hoover Institution and the Federal Archival Agency of the Russian Federation. He also serves or has served on the editorial boards of Comparative Economic Studies, Slavic Review, Journal of Comparative Economics, Problems of Post-Communism, and Explorations in Economic History. Gregory is working with director Marianna Yarovskaya to produce the documentary film Women of the Gulag.
Dr. Sean McMeekin is a member of the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College. McMeekin holds a B.A. from Stanford University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his postdoctoral fellowship at New York University’s Remarque Institute, McMeekin also studied at University of Paris 7, Moscow State University, Humboldt University, and Mezhdunarodny Universitet, Moscow, and taught at Yale and two universities in Turkey (Koç University, Istanbul and Bilkent University, Ankara).
