Smolensk Under Soviet Rule

During World War II, German forces invading the Soviet city of Smolensk captured Party headquarters before local officials could destroy their archives. The collection of official documents thus obtained were eventually given to the American government at the end of the war, and were subsequently made available to scholars for analysis. Merle Fainsod (1907-1972) was one such scholar who used the evidence in order to understand how the early system of Soviet totalitarianism worked. This volume contains his political and historical analysis of the Smolensk region in the 1920s and 1930s.