Uploaded September 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Joshua Rubenstein is a longtime Associate of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Associate Director for Major Gifts at Harvard Law School. He was an organizer and Northeast Regional Director of. Amnesty International, USA, for 37 years.
He has written about Soviet dissent and the Holocaust in German-occupied Soviet territory. His book Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee received a National Jewish Book Award. His concise, interpretive biography of Leon Trotsky is part of the prestigious Jewish Lives Series of Yale University Press. The Last Days of Stalin (Yale UP) is his tenth book. It has been translated into eight different languages.
The Last Days of Stalin take 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 U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower with armed force and was also 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. As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his introduction, “Stalin’s death gave the Kremlin and the West the chance to escape the grim reality of his nightmarish imagination, a challenge they failed to accomplish. That failure haunted the world for decades to follow.”
For more videos in the Krasno Events Series, please check out: youtube.com/user/KrasnoUNC For other similar events, please check out: krasnoevents.com For updates and notifications, follow us on Twitter @KrasnoEventsUNC
Joshua Rubenstein is a longtime Associate of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Associate Director for Major Gifts at Harvard Law School. He was an organizer and Northeast Regional Director of. Amnesty International, USA, for 37 years.
He has written about Soviet dissent and the Holocaust in German-occupied Soviet territory. His book Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee received a National Jewish Book Award. His concise, interpretive biography of Leon Trotsky is part of the prestigious Jewish Lives Series of Yale University Press. The Last Days of Stalin (Yale UP) is his tenth book. It has been translated into eight different languages.
The Last Days of Stalin take 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 U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower with armed force and was also 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. As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his introduction, “Stalin’s death gave the Kremlin and the West the chance to escape the grim reality of his nightmarish imagination, a challenge they failed to accomplish. That failure haunted the world for decades to follow.”
For more videos in the Krasno Events Series, please check out: youtube.com/user/KrasnoUNC For other similar events, please check out: krasnoevents.com For updates and notifications, follow us on Twitter @KrasnoEventsUNC
