Publications

The Rossi Fund has funded and facilitated the publication of Russian and English translations of Jacques, le Français: pour mémoire du Goulag, the product of a collaboration between Jacques Rossi and the writer Michèle Sarde, a complement to Rossi’s Gulag Handbook. The Russian translation, by Elena Baevskaya, was published in 2019 by NLO press as Zhak-frantsuz: v pamiatʹ o GULAGe. The English-language translation, by Kersti Colombant, was published in 2020 by the University of Toronto Press as Jacques the Frenchman: Memories of the Gulag. Both feature an introduction by historian Golfo Alexopolous, who also edited the English-language version.

Published in 2025 by Harvard University Press, Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule by Georgetown historian and Rossi Fund director Michael David-Fox deepens our understanding of totalitarianism in practice. Drawing on new sources, the book examines how ordinary people in the Smolensk Region made uneasy choices under Stalinist repression and Nazi occupation, revealing the everyday mechanics of power, coercion, and strategies of survival under two systems of terror.  

Drawing from a landmark 2013 conference at Georgetown University, The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation and Comparison (Pittsburgh University Press, 2016), edited by Michael David-Fox, brings together some of the most influential voices in Gulag studies. Historians demonstrated conclusively in the decades bracketing the new millennium that the “archipelago” model was in need of drastic modification, and the scholars anthologized here respond by grappling with questions of synthesis, interpretation, and comparison. Elaborating the many possible vantages of a comparative and integrative approach, Oleg Khlevniuk, Wilson Bell, Asif Siddiqi, Golfo Alexopolous, Dan Healey, and Emilia Koustova, treat the tangible interrelationships between the Gulag and the goals, practices, and various organs of the Soviet state as well as conceptual elements like the influence and expression of Soviet “biopolitics” and nationalities and labor policy. Comparative and transnational perspectives by Klaus Mülhahn, Sungmin Cho, Aidan Forth, and Deitrich Beyrau situate the Gulag within a global context of carceral camp systems, drawing on British, Chinese, German, and North Korean examples. Daniel Beer and Judith Pallot trace the Gulag’s roots within the legacy of the Imperial carceral regime, while essays by David-Fox, Bettina Greiner, and Aglaya Glebova provide important historiographical and methodological context. Nearly a decade after its publication, the volume remains a landmark contribution to Gulag studies. A podcast of the international book launch, held at Georgetown’s Mortara Center in October 2017, features many of The Soviet Gulag‘s contributors.

With the support of the Rossi Fund, The Soviet Gulag was published in a revised and updated Russian edition by Academic Studies Press in its Contemporary Western Rusistika (Современная западная русистика) series. It was released in 2021 under the title Феномен Гулага: свидетельства, интерпретации и сравнения [The Gulag Phenomenon: Evidence, Interpretation and Comparison].