Professor Steven Merritt Miner

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Assistant: Amber Garvey

Books

Chair of the History Department at Ohio University, Professor Miner is the author of Between Churchill and Stalin (University of North Carolina Press) which won the American Historical Association’s 1991 George Louis Beer prize for the best book of the year in European history and Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alliance (University of North Carolina Press).  He has written for the TLSForeign Affairs, the L.A. Times, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.  

 

Latest publication THE FURIES UNLEASHED: THE SOVIET PEOPLE AT WAR (1941-1945) - Harper Press - June 2011

Tamerlaine, the great Khan and conqueror of Central Asia, was buried in a sarcophagus covered by the world’s largest single piece of jade.  Legend had it that disturbing the tomb’s cover would unleash on the world the greatest conflict ever known.  Undaunted by that legend, Soviet archaeologists removed the lid on 22 June 1941.  The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on the very same day, mobilizing the greatest army (3,500,000 men) ever known. 

The Furies Unleashed: The Soviet People at War (1941-45) will be historian Steven Merritt Miner’s attempt to do no less than reframe and reassess the details and impact of the Soviet-German War.  In this comprehensive examination, Professor Miner will recast the military, diplomatic and social history of the USSR during the war in a way never before presented.  Making use of collections of previously top-secret documents released in post-Soviet Russia – and consulting a mass of new memoirs published after the collapse of the USSR – he is assembling an updated narrative of this monumental clash, taking into account tangled ethnic, national and regional realities, while blending the cultural, social and economic factors that both devastated and made possible the bloody triumph of the Russian people.  More than just a military history, The Furies Unleashed will offer a “civic history” of the Great Patriotic War.  No English-language book has done this.