'Other Voices in Soviet History: Collected for a Devil’s Advocate' Edited by Heather D. DeHaan, Dan Healey and Tracy McDonald

Dan Healey has recently published Other Voices in Soviet History: Collected for a Devil’s Advocate, with co-editors Heather D. DeHaan and Tracy McDonald. A Festschrift for their doctoral supervisor Lynne Viola, professor emerita of Soviet history at the University of Toronto, it identifies her critical methodological and thematic interventions in the history of the USSR and explores new research trajectories inspired by her thinking.

The collection’s essays are oriented around three overlapping themes: listening to subaltern voices, challenging a rigid victim-perpetrator binary, and contesting dominant narratives. Healey’s contribution analyses the memoirs of Gulag doctors as problematic historical sources. By looking beyond central archives, official collections, and traditional sources, the contributors convey peripheral and subaltern voices from the many crevices of empire.

Other Voices in Soviet History decentres Soviet history by examining how colonial mindsets, war, agency, identity, the proximity of various borders, and transnational interactions shaped political, social, and cultural dynamics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.