Australian economic historian who reconstructed Soviet famine and repression statistics from the archives
"We do not absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine… But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable."
An Australian economic historian and researcher of Soviet social, economic, and demographic history. With Robert W. Davies he co-authored The Years of Hunger (2004), using post-Soviet archives to estimate famine deaths at about 4.5–6.5 million and to argue that the famine was not an intentional genocide but a tragedy produced by forced grain procurement, weather disasters, and reckless industrialisation. His 1990 article 'More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s' began a career-long effort to correct inflated Western figures, later extending to comparative work on German and Soviet repression.
Career Timeline
- 1965–1969Studied Russian, economics and history at Keele University
- 1970–1972British Council exchange scholar, Plekhanov Institute, Moscow
- 1972–1974Postgraduate research, University of Birmingham
- 1990Gained attention for article on scale of Soviet repression
- 1990년대~Director, Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Melbourne
- 2004Published The Years of Hunger (with R. W. Davies)
- 2005Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
- 현재Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne