Hellbeck, Jochen

PERSONAL:

Education: Columbia University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—NJ. Office—History Department, Rutgers University, 111 Van Dyck Hall, 16 Seminary Pl., New Brunswick, NJ 08901. E-mail—hellbeck@history.rutgers.edu.

CAREER:

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, assistant professor of history, 2003—. International advisory board member, Department of History, European University of St. Petersburg, Russia.

MEMBER:

American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Verband der Osteuropahistoriker Deutschlands.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows, 1997-99.

WRITINGS:

(Translator and editor) Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931-1939, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (Munich, Germany), 1996.

(Editor, with Klaus Heller) Autobiographical Practices in Russia = Autobiographisches Praktiken in Russland, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Göttengen, Germany), 2004.

Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Contributor to books, including Self and Story in Russian History, edited by Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2000; Stalinism: New Directions, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000; Stalinism: The Essential Readings, edited by David Hoffman, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2003; Parler de soi sou Staline: La construction identitaire dans le communisme des années trente, edited by Brigitte Studer, Berthold Unfried, and Irene Herrmann, MSH (Paris, France), 2003; and The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History, edited by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Marshall Poe, Kritika Historical Studies (Bloomington, IN), 2003. Contributor to journals, including Russian Review and Ab Imperio. Associate editor, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jochen Hellbeck is an historian whose interests have focused on Russian, particularly the 1917 Russian Revolution and the history of the Soviet Union, as well as relations between Russia and Europe. He is particularly interested in individual histories and self-perceptions in relation to global history. In his Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, Hellbeck examines a series of personal diaries written by ordinary people during Stalin's regime. He addresses their individual concerns and reactions to the upheaval of the political landscape of the time. Hellbeck found the diaries as part of a collection that was opened to public view in 1990 as a result of the end of the Cold War. In an interview with Pam Orel for the Rutgers News, Hellbeck commented: "Historians have long speculated about what people in the Stalinist era actually thought about what was happening around them…. These diaries are a window into their consciousness." Donna Seaman noted in Booklist that the volume "overturns easy assumptions about the inner lives of people subjected to totalitarian rule." A contributor for Publishers Weekly further commented that "his work is a welcome step in creating a deeper understanding of Soviet history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, p. 66.

Nation, August 23, 2006, Sheila Fitzpatrick, review of Revolution on My Mind.

Moscow Times, August 28, 2006, Richard Lourie, review of Revolution on My Mind.

Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2006, review of Revolution on My Mind, p. 57.

Raritan Review, spring, 2007, Nina Khrushcheva, review of Revolution on My Mind.

ONLINE

Rutgers History Department Web site,http://history.rutgers.edu/ (November 28, 2006), faculty profile of Jochen Hellbeck.

Rutgers News Online,http://news.rutgers.edu/ (November 28, 2006), Pam Orel, "Stalin-Era Diaries Paint a Dark Portrait of How Ordinary People Lived."