Dr Vesselin Dimitrov

Dr Vesselin Dimitrov

Associate Professor (Education) and Deputy Head of Department for Education

Department of Government

Telephone
+44 (0)207 955 7908
Room No
CBG 4.38
Office Hours
Book via LSE Student Hub
Languages
Bulgarian, English, Russian
Key Expertise
Democratization, Executives, Communism, Cold War, Central/Eastern Europe

About me

Dr Vesselin Dimitrov is Associate Professor (Education) and Deputy Head of Department for Education in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of three books – Stalin’s Cold War, Governing after Communism, and Bulgaria: The Uneven Transition - and has published numerous scholarly articles. His research interests focus on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe, democratization. executive institutions, communism, and the Cold War.

Research interests

  • Central and Eastern Europe: Government and Politics
  • Cold War
  • Communism
  • Democratisation
  • European Union

Teaching responsibilities

  • GV264: Politics and Institutions in Europe
  • GV245: Democracy and Democratisation
  • GV439: Government and Politics in Eastern Europe
  • GV4B9: The Second Europe

Books

Stalin's Cold War
(Palgrave, 2008)

Dr. Vesselin Dimitrov’s book, Stalin’s Cold War, won the 2008 Alexander Nove Prize for the best book in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet studies. The Nove Prize, awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, is the most prestigious prize in this field and has been conferred on scholars such as Archie Brown, Geoffrey Hosking and Stephen White.

Dr Dimitrov’s book provides a ground breaking analysis of the emergence of the Cold War and the establishment of communism in Eastern Europe from the perspective of the Soviet Union's secretive leader. Drawing on rich new evidence from Soviet, East European and British archives, the book offers fresh and illuminating insights into the evolution of Stalin's strategy from cooperation with the United States and Britain during the Second World War to ideological and geopolitical confrontation. The book reveals Stalin's efforts to grapple with the dynamic interaction between democratic and communist parties in the domestic politics of European countries in the aftermath of the Second World War, and his key role in the gradual but inexorable shift towards communist monopoly of power in the countries of Eastern Europe.

My research