The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union, 1929-1953

Evan Mawdsley is an international historian who has written extensively on the Second World War. Educated at Haverford College, the University of Chicago, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, his work for many years dealt with twentieth-century Russian history, where he wrote and taught on the revolution, the civil war, the Stalin period and the nature of the Soviet-era political elite. His Russian Civil War, originally published in 1987, remains in print as a standard work on the subject. In the past fifteen years his research and writing have concentrated on the Second World War. Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941 1945 was published in 2005. After completing that book he moved in two quite different directions, producing a broad-brush treatment of the whole global conflict in the form of World War II: A New History (2009), and zooming in to examine a critical two weeks of the conflict with December 1941: Twelve Days that Began a World War (2011). He is currently writing an overall naval history of the war, as well as preparing a second edition of Thunder in the East. He was Professor of International History at the University of Glasgow and since 2010 has been an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow there.