See also: Werth
Nicolas Werth , born in 1950, is a French historian specialist in the history of the Soviet Union. He is researcher with the Institut of history of time present, affiliated at CNRS.
Course
The father of Nicolas Werth is the English journalist Alexander Werth, which passed to the USSR the years of war. Former student of the National university of Saint-Cloud, aggregate of history, Nicolas Werth taught in the secondary and abroad (Minsk, New York, Moscow, Shanghai). He occupied the functions of cultural attache near the Ambassade from France to Moscow during the Perestroïka (1985-1989).Entered to CNRS in 1989, Nicolas Werth devoted himself since its first book ( To be communist in the USSR under Stalin , Gallimard, 1981) to the Soviet history. It is particularly the social Histoire years 1920-1930 which interests it, in particular the relationship between the capacity and the company (official violence, social resistances…).
Work
Nourishing its reflection and its work, not only of the assets of the Western Soviétologie, but also of work of his Russian colleagues (the Russian being its native tongue), it places its research from the point of view of a going beyond of cleavage between “school of the Totalitarisme” and “school Révisionniste”, regarding it as obsolete after the collapse of the USSR and the opening at least partial of the files. However, by its attachment with the social history, “a long time remained the poor relationship of a sovietology centered exclusively on the policy”, there rather places from the point of view of work of the historians “revisionists”. He explains besides, contrary to certain sovietologists who thought that the totalitarian control of the Soviet company had been effective, that the reports/ratios of the political police “often reveal the distortion existing between a desired reality and the reality of the facts”.Author of the part of the black Book of Communism devoted to this country, it publicly dissociated idea contained in the foreword of Stephan Courtois according to which the Communisme would be essentially criminogene. He also denounced, concerning this work, “a drift of the exclusively police history”.
Nicolas Werth takes part, since 1997, with the seminar “History Soviet: sources and methods”, placed under the direction of Wladimir Berelowitch, the Center of studies of the worlds Russian, Caucasian and center-European (CERCEC) of EHESS. He is in addition member of the editorial boards of Twentieth Century. Review of history and the Books of the Russian world .
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