Victoria Smolkin

vsmolkin@wesleyan.edu
Articles by Victoria Smolkin

One Year Ago: Historian Victoria Smolkin Assesses Putin’s Claim that Modern-Day Ukraine is a “Gift” from the Bolsheviks

As a historian, what struck me most about the historical narrative of Vladimir Putin’s speech was not only what “historical facts”—to borrow his terminology—Putin used, but also what he left out.

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“Fantasy is Not History”: Historian Victoria Smolkin Assesses Putin’s Claim that Modern-Day Ukraine is a “Gift” from the Bolsheviks

To understand the scholarly merits of Ukrainian and Soviet history as presented by Mr. Putin, “Meduza” turned to Dr. Victoria Smolkin, a historian at Wesleyan University who studies Communism, the Cold War, as well as atheism and religion in the former Soviet Union. She is also the author of the 2018 book “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism.”

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