Four distinguished experts on Soviet history and Soviet politics discuss the issues raised by Andrea Graziosi in his article “The Weight of the Past in Post-Soviet Russia,” which appeared in the Winter 2020–2021 issue of the JCWS. The article and the discussion forum are the first of several items that will be published in the journal over the next few years assessing a variety of legacies of the Cold War.

This article offers a comparative study of the domestic and international dimensions of two calamitous famines in Communist countries: one in the USSR engendered by Iosif Stalin's Great Turning Point (1928–1934) and the other in the People's Republic of China in connection with Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). The article traces the historical roots of these catastrophes and explains how Sino-Soviet interactions affected the genesis of the famine in China. It also discusses the long-term consequences of these avoidable tragedies, comparing their impact on subsequent Soviet and Chinese history. A close look at the evident affinity between the famines opens new and at times unexpected vistas, which allow us not only to get a better grasp of each event in its own specificity but also to shed new light on fundamental questions.

This forum includes commentaries by seven experts—Joshua Rubenstein, Paul Hollander, Andrea Graziosi, Roman Szporluk, Jeffrey Hardy, Michael Ellman, and Jeffrey Rossman—on Norman Naimark's Stalin's Genocides , published by Princeton University Press in 2010. Most of the commentators praise the book highly but raise some questions about specific points, such as the use of the term “genocidal,” the application of “genocide” to the atrocities perpetrated by Iosif Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, and the estimated numbers of Stalin's victims. Two of the commentators take stronger issue with Naimark's book, particularly the comparison one might make between Stalin's crimes and those of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Eastern Europe. The forum concludes with a reply by Naimark, who not only responds to points raised by the commentators but also elaborates on his intentions when writing the book.