Through whom?

Dear reader, you have come to this page because you liked one or more of my works – probably books. Only one of my monographs was published in English – Stalin’s Commandos, published in 8 languages. I have all the rights to the other books, and it would be great to publish 4 more, already written, in English.

Thank you for your attention!

It is possible that you will be able to provide some support.

We live in an open society. And sometimes, those who want to do something good and necessary for it – in particular, for the procurement and production of new knowledge, as well as its dissemination – face the question: through whom to find a person, in cooperation with whom to do this? We are talking about three areas of work of the scholar and the author: teaching, education through mass media, and research. For obvious reasons, it is important to do this in the West, primarily in English-speaking countries.

Let’s take a closer look at all three areas.

1) Teaching is not just the dissemination of knowledge, but also part of the research. Students ask questions, put forward ideas and assumptions, object, and report little-known information. In conversations with students, future books, articles, interviews and reports are born, or at least polished.

Therefore, it would be great if you talked to those of your acquaintances who communicate with people affiliated with Western universities, so that they, in turn, might send an email to an address ending, say, in “.edu,” “.at ,” “.ca,” “.il,” “.uk” or even “.de.” It happens in life that colleagues who are on different floors of the same building do not know that they need each other. Perhaps they would like to strengthen their institution – for a limited or extended period of time – with an assistant professor with a pedagogical diploma, an international reputation and university teaching experience in St. Petersburg and Potsdam. There I had a contract for a year and a half. Short-term contracts in the academic field are a German feature.

Contacts in research centers, institutes and universities can be extremely useful for advancing in the following two directions.

2) For a quarter of a century, I have been collaborating with Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and German media – very different ones, including television. For example, on RTVi, for several years in a row, I was on the talk show Country and People (Strana i liudi). Its organizers used me as a natural counterbalance to the hardened Putin’s songbird Alexander Rahr.

Therefore, why not try to find editors in the Western mass media who are ready to print innovative popular science and journalistic texts? Why not look for presenters who might wish to refresh the broadcast with another voice or face? Perhaps it is best to ask journalists you know about this, because they are often in touch with people working in the humanities.

I have something to offer specifically to those who are ready to consider the submitted materials and the announced topics substantively.

Not all Western media are tightly walled up from the people in a pork tower. For example, peer-review journals are seen by many as a reflection of a narrow circle of limited people, calling them “nepotism-review.” There is a popular notion that they are plagued by cronyism, the long and tenacious hand of the Kremlin, inertia and red tape, narrative discourse (word-mongering), ordinary incompetence and other similar phenomena. But not everybody is tarred with the same brush. After all, I have already found four reputable journals where I can publish my articles – without censorship intrusions into the content. And I found them on my own.

https://fu-berlin.academia.edu/AlexanderGogun

Therefore, it is possible that with your help and, most importantly, with the assistance of your acquaintances and their colleagues, smart and honest editors or presenters can be reached. Truth does not like silence, which, as folk wisdom has it, is loved by …

3) …money – money needed for research. The latter is the basis of the scholar’s work. Archival research, including long trips, is most important for the appearance of books, articles, and reports. In addition, it is necessary to pay not only for the possibility of copying in archives, but also for the work of archivists – the specialists employed to search for documents. It is also necessary to subscribe to magazines, purchase books, from time to time buy a new computer, other office equipment, consumables; to hire assistants to sort out the collected material, conduct initial selection (time-consuming rough work). In a number of cases, the assistance of translators is extremely useful so that they can help me understand the meaning of a particular text in a language that I have not yet mastered. Well, and of course, money is needed in order not to think about it, wasting precious time on endless attempts to get it, but to live researching.

You can offer support yourself with the hard-earned penny, or share information about this site, or phone those who have in their social circle prosperous and generous lovers of Clio who regard Stalinism with a sober eye. It doesn’t matter where they live – in London or Moscow, Washington or Berlin. People are brought together not so much by languages (I know several myself), but by common aspirations.

We are talking about the implementation of two interrelated projects – writing a military biography of Stalin, as well as compiling a collection of articles on the expansion of various communist regimes around the world. It would be great to include in this collection stories related to the history of the United States, Britain, partly Australia and Canada, including Soviet espionage and Cold War conflicts, and especially Stalin’s preparation for the Third World War – a fact, alas, almost unknown in the West. Such topics as the Holodomor and the UPA could fit quite organically into such a book.

My previous monograph, Stalin’s Commandos (London - New York, 2016) was published in eight languages, including English and German, although it was dedicated to a relatively small group of people – there were about a hundred thousand red partisans in Ukraine. I hope that a book that deals with the fate of, in fact, all mankind will have a greater effect. The main thing is to pack it tightly with previously unknown archival documents, which contain vivid facts as of yet unknown to anyone.

I will be happy to explain to any well-wishers what exactly the contribution will go to, and if desired, information about this will be published. Openness is insurance against misunderstandings. However, others prefer privacy, which is even easier to provide.

The main thing is to find like-minded people who are ready for conversation and support.