We are delighted to welcome the latest member of the Contemporary Histories Research Group, Professor Stephen Wheatcroft.
Stephen has taught at Birmingham University (Centre for Russian & East European Studies), Melbourne University, (where he was Foundation Director of the Centre for Russian & Euro-asian Studies, and head of History Dept,) and in Nazarbayev University Kazakhstan, (History Department). He is a regular visiting fellow at the Instiute of Demography at Moscow State University and the Centre for Economic History in the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and in 2017 was a visiting fellow at the Eurasian Research Centre at Hokkaido University.
2018 will see the completion of a major series of economic histories of the USSR that were led initially by E.H.Carr and then R.W.Davies. Stephen has played a major role in these works as author-co-author, co-editor and main specialist on agricultural and demographic history and the history of Soviet statistics and planning. These volumes include: R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, S. G. Wheatcroft, eds., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945, Cambridge University Press, 1994; R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004; R.W.Davies, O.Khlevnyuk and S.G.Wheatcroft, The Years of Progress: The Soviet Economy 1934-1936, Palgrave-Macmillan 2012. The final volume R.W.Davies, Mark Harrison, O.Khlevnyuk and S.G.Wheatcroft, ’The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 1937-1939’ will be completed in March 2018, and should appear in 2019.
Stephen has played a major role in exploring the Soviet archives and publishing materials from the archives. He was on the editorial board of Viktor Danilov’s 5 volumed series of archival materials The Tragedy of the Soviet Village, 1927-1939 (in Russian) and provided the analytical chapters on population data and grain statistics. He played a similar role in Viktor Kondrashin’s recent 3 volumes of archival materials Famine in the USSR, 1929-34, Iin Russian) and provided its demographic over-view).
His research interests have developed from Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history, into the comparative history of famine and food supply problems in modern world history, and the comparative history of Repression. He is also interested in the history of statistics, and in the historical modelling and mapping of crop weather relationships. He also has an ongoing interested in recent developments in Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet countries.
Stephen was named a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2005.
