During the Cold War, the Smolensk Archive held the only collection of Communist Party documents available to Western scholars, becoming the foundation for generations of scholarship on Soviet history. Crucibles of Power returns to the Smolensk Region with fresh eyes and fresh sources. Prizewinning historian Michael David-Fox traces the experiences of Smolensk residents between the interwar years and the end of World War II, a period during which the city and region passed from Stalinist rule to Nazi occupation and back. The result is a revelatory examination of choice and power under dueling forms of murderous totalitarianism.

Michael David-Fox is Professor and Director, Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, & Director, Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. A historian of Russia and the USSR, his work has ranged across political and cultural history, communism and fascism, the history of the Russian Revolution and comparative revolutionary studies, transnational studies and modernity theory, and the history of Bolshevism and Stalinism. His most recent research explores the history of the Eastern Front in WWII, Nazi-Stalinist entanglements, political violence, the German occupation of Russian territories in WWII, and the historical roots and history politics of Putinism.

He is author of Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 (1997); Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (2012, translated into Russian and Chinese, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title); Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (2015, Russian translation NLO 2020, winner of the 2016 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book in Russian Intellectual and Cultural History); and Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard University Press, Feb. 2025).

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year.