Groundbreaking dissertation on Stalin's top secret administration

Historian Niels Erik Rosenfeldt will defend his doctoral thesis The 'Special' World - Stalin's Power Apparatus and the Soviet System's Secret Structures of Communication at the Faculty of Humanities, the University of Copenhagen, on 13 February 2009.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a number of secret Soviet archives were opened to researchers, and Associate Professor Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, attached to the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies within the Faculty of Humanities has since been a frequent guest in the archives, conducting research into Stalin's secret state apparatus.

In his thesis Rosenfeldt analyses and discusses the principles of the hidden soviet administration that arose in Stalin's secret chancellery and several other secret departments within the Soviet Communist Party, security services and the Communist International (the Comintern). He examines what role the secret agencies played in the Soviet decision making process.

The thesis was released in book form on January 2 by Museum Tusculanum.

The Defence

The defence will take place on Friday 13 February at 13.00, at the University of Copenhagen, Amager, auditorium 23.0.50, Njalsgade 126, 2300 Copenhagen S. Acting as opponents are Professor, Dphil Bent Jensen from the University of Southern Denmark and Professor, Dphil Poul Villaume of the University of Copenhagen.

The defence is open to be public.

About Niels Erik Rosenfeldt

Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, one of the country's foremost Soviet experts, received his MA in History and Russian in 1970 from the University of Copenhagen and has since been a committed promoter of Russian and Soviet history to a wider public, as well as to his research colleagues.

In the last few years he has published a biography of Stalin (2006) and Lenin (2008). He received the H.O. Lange prize for his Lenin biography, a prize awarded for outstanding dissemination of research.