Welcome to the Stalin's Letters project! This website and research was
created by Hunter Casazza and Peter Busscher for Computational Methods in the Humanities
at the University of Pittsburgh. This work explores the correspondence between Joseph
Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov between 1925 and 1936. We are working with the original
Russian of the corpus, although we have slightly modified the text in order to suit our
research purposes. A link to the original Russian-language dataset can be found on our
Resources page. Since Peter is the only
group member with high proficiency in Russian, our group constructed a division of labor
for the research project. Hunter set up the website, has been bugfixing, and is
responsible for the SVG present on the Conclusion
page.
The Stalin's Letters project is historical, linguistic, and grounded in computer methods. Parsing this corpus of letters through the methods of a digital humanist took lots of patience, time and training. Throughout the semester, it gradually dawned on me that digital methods will be an essential tool in the toolbox of future humanities scholars. The ability to obtain statistics However, through the use of XML, Xpath, and Regular expressions, we learned how to work smarter and employ the tools at the computer's disposal.
This project was created by Hunter Casazza and Peter Busscher for Computational Methods in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh. This work explores the correspondence between Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov between 1925 and 1936. In these letters we see a leader who is in many ways empowered, but still ascending his own personal quest to power. In these letters we see a wide-ranging subject matter of industrial policy, specific articles in Komsomolskaya Pravda and international relations, among other things.
Compared to Joseph Stalin, who needs little introduction, Vyacheslav Molotov may be less familiar to a general audience. To students of Soviet history and World War II, Molotov is a silent giant. While he was capable of great outbursts of emotion, Molotov was a quite, calculating man. He was an extraordinarily effective deputy, and an effective negotiator. Famously, he concluded the Pact with Hitler's Germany which has became known to history as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Although, within these letters, Molotov was not yet the influential Foreign Affairs Minister that he would later become, he is still a privileged confidant who learns the inner workings (to the greatest extent extent one could) of Stalin's mind. Since relatively few letters from the collection are written by Molotov, most being addressed to him, Molotov is not a character of many words. His personality is made visible in the negative, since the only thing we can only discern about Molotov is Stalin's manner of writing to him and addressing him as a deputy, comrade, and lieutenant. I would dare say, not as a researcher but as a human, that Stalin probably felt that Molotov was his friend. However, as with most high-placed people in Stalin's USSR, Molotov later saw his fortunes take a turn for the worse. It wasn't until 1949, four years after the conclusion of the "Great Patriotic War," that Molotov fell out of favor with Stalin and was replaced by the prosecutor Vyshinsky. In 1953, after the death of Stalin, Molotov was reinstated as Foreign Minister for a time. However, his determined opposition to Nikita Khrushchev's "Thaw" put him in a politically precarious position. He called Khrushchev a "right-wing deviationist." Huh. He was later sacked.
history, end of NEP, collectivization