Professor Stephen Smith

Professor Stephen Smith
Emeritus Fellow
All Souls College
01865 (2)79343
stephen.smith2@history.ox.ac.uk

My research interests are in the histories of modern Russia and China and in comparative Communism. I am writing a book on the 'politics of the supernatural' which compares the efforts of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union (1917-41) and the People’s Republic of China (1949-76) to eliminate 'superstition' from daily life, in areas such as popular religion, calendrical and life-cycle rituals, agriculture and folk medicine. It compares the ways in which ordinary people deployed religious and magical beliefs and practices as a way of dealing with and putting meaning on the turbulent and often traumatic changes that overtook their lives.

See page on All Souls College website

Publications

  • Class

    January 2019
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The Making of the Human Sciences in China: Historical and Conceptual Foundations

  • Violence in the Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1914-2: A Survey of Recent Historiography

    January 2019
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    Chapter
    |
    Circles of the Russian Revolution. Internal and International Consequences of the Year 1917 in Russia

  • Russia in Revolution An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928

    January 2017
    |
    Book
    Drawing on recent archivally-based scholarship, Russia in Revolution pays particular attention to the varying impact of the Revolution on the various groups that made up society: peasants, workers, non-Russian nationalities, the army, women ...
    History

  • Introduction

    January 2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The Cambridge History of Communism, vol.1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country, 1917-1941

  • ‘Communism and Religion’

    January 2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    The Cambridge History of Communism,
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