Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sarah Davies and James Harris, eds. Stalin. A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005. xiii, 295pp. Index. £40, cloth. £18.99, paper.The volume under review, based on the proceedings of a conference held at Durham University shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death, contains fourteen contributions by experts on Stalin and Stalinism. The book's aim-to reinvigorate scholarly interest in Stalin-is admirably achieved, for there is not a weak essay in the collection. The contributions are placed in a roughly chronological framework, ranging from Stalin's formative years in Georgia (Alfred Rieber) to his writings on science and economics during the Cold War (Ethan Pollock). The core of the book focuses on Stalin's wielding of political power: Commissar of Nationalities (Jeremy Smith), General secretary (James Harris), Prime Minister (J. Arch Getty), dictator (Oleg Khlevniuk), the maker of foreign policy (Alfred Rieber), Marxist ideologue (Erick van Ree) and Bolshevik romantic (David Priestland).In his account of Stalin's youth and politicization, Alfred Rieber demythologizes much of the accepted canon: Stalin was not expelled from the Tiflis seminary for Marxist propaganda but struck off because of his failure to sit exams, even though his first contact to the workers was through another seminarian, Lado Ketskhoveli, who had been expelled from the school four years before Stalin left it voluntarily. Rieber demonstrates that Stalin was originally a populist, deeply influenced by heroic Georgian tales of social banditry, and converted to Marxism much later than his hagiographers stated. Jeremy Smith analyses Stalin in the Commissariat for Nationalities, his differences with Lenin on federalism (Georgian crisis 1922) and his belief in Russian superiority. According to James Harris, Stalin, as General secretary, appointed officials who vociferously supported him in choking off internal debate and eliminating signs of Oppositional' activity.In his focussed study of Stalin as Prime Minister, J. Arch Getty examines how the Politburo functioned and sees parallels to Western cabinets (United Kingdom): having to decide an increasing number of decisions for complex societies, so that many measures are agreed upon by small groups prior to the actual sittings. Getty makes two other vital points: that the personal authority of Politburo members did not depend on the size of the fiefdoms they administered but on the nature of their personal relationship to Stalin; and that his lieutenants were strong figures in their own right, battling with one another for budgetary concessions and prestige, before submitting to Stalin's arbitration. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".