Common Ground

This week, we hear from Sophie Pinkham, a writer and academic who specializes in Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics. Sophie has recently published some review essays, primarily in The Nation, about the Russian Revolution and the legacy of communism in the West. One of her main concerns is the manner in which a given historian’s politics will affect their reading of the history and legacy of communism. Of course, it’s true that a historian’s reading of the past will inevitably be determined, at least to some extent, by their politics: a conservative will understand an event and its significance differently than a progressive. But Sophie Pinkham makes quite clear why the political assumptions behind this or that reading of the rise of Lenin, say, are uniquely important for us to understand and make clear. Sophie and I talk about Anne Applebaum’s recent book Red Famine, for instance; we talk in particular about Applebaum’s effort to insist that communism and Nazism are equally bad, and I ask Sophie what