Since its first publication in France in 1982, Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich's Utopia in Power has met unanimous praise from the press and from academia. Sovietologist Alain Besancon said at that time, "There has not been a work on Soviet history more intelligent, rigorous, and complete than Heller-Nekrich's.
In this issue, THE WORLD & I excerpts two highly praised passages from the work dealing with the Stalinist period. The first of these details how Stalin institutionalized totalitarian rule through the rewriting of the Soviet constitution and, in a more profound way, the rewriting of the whole of Russian history. The second passage, explaining the background of the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939, argues that Stalin's motivation for aggressively pursuing the alliance with Germany was related primarily to his strategy to obtain territory in Eastern Europe for the Soviet Union.
A symposium on Utopia in Power follows the excerpt, including a profile of the authors by journalist Jean Pierre Gabriel, remarks by Sovietologists Martin Dewhirst, Geoffrey Hosking, and Alec Nove, and a comment by THE WORLD & I editor and publisher, Mortan A. Kaplan.
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