Stuck on Communism

This memoir by one of the foremost scholars of the Soviet period spans three continents and more than half a century—from the 1950s when Lewis Siegelbaum's father was a victim of McCarthyism up through the implosion of the Soviet Union and beyond. Siegelbaum recreates journeys of discovery and self-discovery in the tumult of student rebellion at Columbia University during the Vietnam War, graduate study at Oxford, and Moscow at the height of détente. His story takes the reader into the Soviet archives, the coalfields of eastern Ukraine, and the newly independent Uzbekistan.

An intellectual autobiography that is also a biography of the field of Anglophone Soviet history, Stuck on Communism is a guide for how to lead a life on the Left that integrates political and professional commitments. Siegelbaum reveals the attractiveness of Communism as an object of study and its continued relevance decades after its disappearance from the landscape of its origin.

Through the journey of a book that is in the end a romance, Siegelbaum discovers the truth in the notion that no matter what historians take as their subject, they are always writing about themselves.

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.

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.

This memoir can be read as a true confession of love [...] for history and historical craft.

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.

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.

His autobiography is an irresistible page-turner...

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.

Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan, author of The Soviet Experiment:

Few in the field have brought the unique perspectives and deep dives into the archives that Siegelbaum has delivered to inform us about the fraught history of the USSR. He leads us through his personal evolution from student in the Cold War decades to mature scholar unafraid to swim against the Russophobic and anti-Soviet currents of much of the public and even the profession.

Erik R. Scott, University of Kansas, author of Familiar Strangers:

This book is a generational portrait, an extended historiographical essay, and an occasional guide for graduate students whose uniqueness and strength rests in its hybridity. How I wish this book had been available to me when I began graduate school! Throughout, it is engaging and enjoyable to read.