Artemy Kalinovsky

Artemy Kalinovsky is a historian. His first book, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard, 2011), drew on archives and interviews to reconstruct Moscow's attempts to extricate itself from a conflict the USSR's had long come to see as a quagmire. The second, Laboratory of Socialist Development (Cornell, 2018), was based on archives and fieldwork conducted in Central Asia, and examined the promise and upheaval of Soviet policies in that region. The second book one the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). He teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Barbarossa

On June 21, 1941, forty-four year old Frida W., a resident of Kyiv, dropped a hand-held mirror, which shattered on impact. This happened around nine PM, at the end of a hot and sunny summer day. (On the evening news, the radio announcer had shared predictions of a record wheat harvest). The mirror fell as Frida was brushing out her hair, which was still black and full and hung down to her lower back.
Return to Author Index