Jan Burzlaff is a historian of modern Europe at Cornell University. His work examines how ordinary people navigate dictatorship, political violence, and institutional constraint, with particular interests in testimony, memory, and the history of everyday life. He is currently completing a victim-centered history of Jews in the Holocaust for Polity Press.
Jan Burzlaff
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Writing on Public Books
What Happens When Belief Stops Mattering?
“From the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was sustained not by terror or conviction, but by something harder to name: a routinization of participation.”
