In recent decades, a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. What do we know about these "Spin Dictators"?

The anthology with student essays from SSE's course in Applied History is now in print.

Policy brief: The recently declassified proceedings of the Swedish Academy shed new light on why it awarded Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the literature prize in 1970. His novels reflected unique experiences of many prisoners. The Academy characterized his work as a renewal of the great Russian literary tradition. However...

Policy brief: As time passes and archives open, ever more topics in Russian military-economic history can be studied with primary sources. One such theme is the colossal evacuation of industrial enterprises and equipment from July 1941 onwards. Thousands of railway cars and lorries carried equipment, raw materials, as well as personnel from Ukraine, the Baltics, and western regions of the Russian Federation to the Urals and beyond.

An important process that occurs at the nexus of entrepreneurship and family is the creation of new opportunities for one’s self and one’s kin. But this is not an easy task. There are many challenges that come with facing this unfamiliar and uncharted territory. For this reason, it makes sense that the journey be narrated in the form of metaphors embedded in family discourse. Yet, little is known about how these narratives are constructed or used.

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly interested in understanding the challenges and opportunities of building entrepreneurial family businesses from different perspectives. Most researchers in this area tend to draw on insights from the management and economics disciplines for theoretical and methodological guidance. However, other subjects, like psychology, family sciences, and history, have also been emphasized – and now even the humanities.

Lennart Samuelson, affiliated researcher of SITE and associate professor of economic history at the Stockholm School of Economics, is one of the few historians in the world that have used materials from formerly secret archives of Soviet Union to find out the reality of how Soviet authorities actually formed their long-term industrialization plans in the late 1920s and 1930s, in order to cope with the probable conditions in case of a total war.

by Evelina Bonnier (with Jonas Poulsen, Thorsten Rogall and Miri Stryjan), SITE Working paper

by Erik Meyersson (with P. Aghion and P. Howitt), published as chapter in the book of Aghion and Howitt's "The Economics of Growth", MIT Press