Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022. This is a provocative new history of the Soviet myth of victory in World War II from its Stalinist origins to its emergence as arguably the supreme symbol of state authority during the late-socialist period. Jonathan Brunstedt shows how the memory of the war became a battleground between notions of a 'pan-Soviet' people on the one hand and of Russian leadership and Russian-led ethnic hierarchy on the other. While Russo-centric narratives of the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet eras persisted, the story of the war emerged as an alternative, supra-ethnic source of patriotic identity that was capable of subsuming a diverse range of loyalties to the Soviet whole. However, Brunstedt shows how a 'Russophile' faction of party elites and even some non-Russian party organizations, eager to preserve the primacy of unique ethnic identities, histories, and hierarchy, contested the idea of an overarching Soviet people. The book sheds new light on longstanding historical questions linked to the politics of remembrance and provides a crucial historical context for the national-patriotic revival of the war's memory in Russia today.
Synopsis
This pioneering monograph - a Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year - asks how a socialist society, ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle, reconciled itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war. Through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II, arguably the central defining event of the Soviet epoch, the book shows that while state historical narratives reinforced a sense of Russian primacy and Russian dominated ethnic hierarchy, the story of the war enabled an alternative, supra-ethnic source of belonging, which subsumed Russian and non-Russian loyalties alike to the Soviet whole. The tension and competition between Russocentric and 'internationalist' conceptions of victory, which burst into the open during the late 1980s, reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space. The book sheds new light on long standing questions linked to the politics of remembrance and provides a crucial historical context for the patriotic revival of the war's memory in Russia today.