Sarah Davies is a historian specializing in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.
[1] Davies received the Alec Nove Prize for her first book, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia,[2] which was translated into Russian in 2011.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the book draws on Stalin's personal archives and previously unstudied diaries of people close to him to explain how he understood the world.
The authors argue that Stalin was not a paranoid driven by irrational fears; instead, his beliefs were shaped by misperceptions stemming in part from flawed intelligence.
[4] Davies is currently working on a book on British and Soviet cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.