Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order

by Sarah Davies, James Harris

Drawing on declassified material from Stalin’s personal archive, this is the first systematic attempt to analyze how Stalin saw his world—both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Stalin rarely left his offices and viewed the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters, and books. Analyzing these materials, Sarah Davies and James Harris provide a new understanding of Stalin’s thought process and leadership style and explore not only his perceptions and misperceptions of the world but the consequences of  these perceptions and misperceptions.

Genres: History, Russia, Soviet Union, Soviet History

340 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2014

About the author

Sarah Davies is a historian specializing in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.

She is a professor of history at Durham University in Durham, England, United Kingdom, and currently serves as chair of the History Department.

Davies received the Alec Nove Prize for her first book, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia,[2] which was translated into Russian in 2011.[3] Along with James Harris, she is the author of the 2015 Stalin's World: Dictating the Soviet Order. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the book draws on Stalin's personal archives and previously unstudied diaries of people close to him to explain how he understood the world. The authors argue that Stalin was not a paranoid driven by irrational fears; instead, his beliefs were shaped by misperceptions stemming in part from flawed intelligence.[4] Davies is currently working on a book on British and Soviet cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.