Few events in the history of the twentieth century are as controversial, politicized, and laden with emotion as is the launching of operation Barbarossa—the German Invasion of Russia. It has become a fertile ground for conspiracy theories and a subject of unending polemics. This presentation will discuss a vital but missing dimension: the subjugation of ideological premises to the everlasting Russian imperial legacy as the driving force behind Stalin's policies on the eve of operation Barbarossa.



Gabriel Gorodetsky is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and the holder of the Rubin Chair for Russian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Formerly, Gorodetsky was a Wilson Center fellow, served as the founder and director of the Cummings Center for Russian Studies at Tel Aviv University, and was a visiting fellow at St. Antony's College in Oxford. Gorodetsky has taught at the universities of Munich and Cologne, and at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of numerous books including The Precarious Truce: Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1924-1927; Stafford Cripps' Mission to Moscow, 1940-42; Mif Ledokola; and Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. Gorodetsky studied history and Russian studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and went on to obtain his Ph.D degree under the supervision of the renowned British historian E.H. Carr in Oxford. In 2010, Gorodetsky received an honorary doctorate from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow.