Stuck on Communism

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University. His books include Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941, and the award-winning Cars for Comrades. He co-authored with Jim von Geldern the award-winning website "Seventeen Moments in Soviet History," Stalinism as a Way of Life with Andrei Sokolov, and Broad is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia's Twentieth Century with Leslie Page Moch.

If a young scholar wants to glimpse a life as a historian, the course of a career unvarnished by nostalgia, if she wants to understand the shortfalls, lost paths, and self-doubt, as well as the jet-setting, keynote triumphs, this book is a must-read.(Russian Review) His autobiography is an irresistible page-turner...("Beyond the Kremlin" blog) Siegelbaum brings many tools of the historian's craft to his disarmingly frank, often self-deprecating autobiographical story of change amid consistency...[A] new generation of Russia experts should find Siegelbaum's intellectual odyssey compelling.(Times Literary Supplement) This engaging autobiography revolves around Lewis Siegelbaum's twin commitments to leftwing politics and the academic study of Soviet history. Above all, Stuck on Communism is valuable for illuminating the personal stakes that animated some of the so-called 'revisionist' scholars of Soviet history.(Europe-Asia Studies) This memoir can be read as a true confession of love [...] for history and historical craft.(AB IMPERIO) In Siegelbaum's books and articles, there is never an acceptance of the world as it has become, but an enduring faith that alternatives exist and that history is a practice capable of informing us of different possible futures.(American Historical Review)

• Preface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Tennis and Communism2. "Revolutionary or Scholar?"3. Oxford and Moscow4. Melbourne and Labor History5. Labor History and Social History via the Cultural Turn6. Centers and Peripheries7. Online and on the Road8. The Migration ChurchUnfinished ThoughtsNotesIndex