David Brandenberger

Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda

“It is quite clear that the Socialist economy is not founded on Platon Karatayev,” declared L.D. Trotsky in 1920, attacking a symbolic peasant figure in L.N. Tolstoi’s War and Peace as a remnant of old Russia.1 In this declaration Trotsky articulated a common dream of the Bolsheviks: to cut themselves off from Russia’s past and remake the mind of the Russian people in accordance with their own ideology. After ten years of experimentation, however, the Bolsheviks found that their socialist heroes and other symbols were not attractive enough by themselves to mobilize the ordinary people in war, and those symbols needed to be supplemented with other ones, closer to the people’s hearts from the tsarist era. This u-turn, or retreat, of Soviet politics has long been well known, but recently it has aroused renewed interest as an important topic in the history of national identity in modern Russia. This volume, composed of 12 articles and many historical documents, is a fruit of this renewed interest in the rehabilitation of the tsarist era in Stalin’s Russia, and the attempt of the editors to investigate the complicated and contradictory Stalinist revision of history by organizing collective research from different disciplines attains much success. However contradictory and full of tensions, it is beyond doubt that the revision of the tsarist era in the 1930s was launched from above. Tracing the downfall of Dem’ian Bednyi by the mid-1930s, Alexander Dubrovsky makes clear the gulf between the old, internationalist modes of mocking the Russian epic and the new official modes of rehabilitating traditional Russian culture. The revision of history for propaganda purposes is evident in two studies on the rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible. As Maureen Perrie points out, among M.A. Bulgakov’s banned plays, only Ivan Vasil’evich had not been revived because of its historical theme. David Brandenberger and Kevin Platt underline the practical necessity for the party leaders to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible because of his mobilizing capacity. That the revision of tsarist history was initiated from above does not mean, of course, that it was just a manipulation by the party to mobilize the people. A

Stalin's populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity

This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array of theorists, it argues that such a sense of identity only becomes possible after the establishment of necessary social institutions – universal schooling, a modern army, etc. Inasmuch as these institutions come into being only after the formation of the Soviet Union, this article focuses on how a mass sense of Russian national identity began to form under a rapid and unpredictable series of ideological shifts that occurred during the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. This articles major contribution is its description of this development as not only contingent, but accidental. Drawing a clear line between russocentric propaganda and full-blown Russian nationalism, it argues that the ideological initiatives that precipitated mass identity formation in the USSR were populist rather than nationalist. In this sense, Stalinism has much more in common with Perónism than it does with truly national regimes.

Stalin's Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Antisemitism and the Doctor's Plot

Debates over the nature of official antisemitism during the last decade of Stalin’s life have long occupied a prominent place in scholarship concerning 20th-century Russian history. Particularly controversial have been rumors of a plan for the deportation of Soviet Jews that is said to have been abandoned in early March 1953, on the eve of its implementation, when Stalin suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. In March 2003, The New York Times commemorated the 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death with a sensational article heralding the appearance of a new book that reveals “for the first time the incredible full story of the Doctors’ Plot” on the basis of new, heretofore unavailable documentation from the former Soviet archives. Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, details a vast scheme to implicate Jewish medical specialists in a conspiracy against the Soviet leadership. The exposure of this treasonous plot, a modern-day Dreyfus Affair, was apparently designed to trigger outrage and pogroms across the USSR and to justify the exiling of the Soviet Jews to the wastelands of Siberia. According to Brent and Naumov, this campaign ultimately proved to be too extreme even for Stalin’s most trusted comradesin-arms, who poisoned the dictator to prevent the realization of his terrifying scheme. Based on an array of still-classified archival documents, Stalin’s Last Crime has much to offer. It provides evidence of factional infighting and renegades

Imagined Community? Rethinking the Nationalist Origins of the Contemporary Chechen Crisis

Over a decade of turmoil in the breakaway republic of Chechnya has given rise to an extensive new body of literature on the subject. Much of this material focuses on the Russian Federation’s campaign against the self-proclaimed Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the poorly funded Russian forces’ almost daily clashes with Chechen modzhakhedy (mujaheddin) and their mercenary allies. Other books and articles explore the implications of the conflict in terms of North Caucasian geopolitics, Islamic fundamentalism, international terrorism, regional oil interests, civilian casualties, displaced refugees, and the repeated violation of basic human rights and press freedoms. Although this literature is chiefly concerned with contemporary issues, much of it refers to the present conflict as the result of an age-old ethnic struggle between the Russian and Chechen peoples. This review essay examines these efforts to historicize the contemporary crisis by investigating whether present-day Chechen militancy should be seen as the result of a long-standing tradition of nationalist insurgency in the region. Most recent commentary on the North Caucasus situates the First Chechen War (1994–96) and the ongoing Second Chechen War (which began in 1999) within a broad historical narrative. Beginning with the revolts under Sheikh Mansur (1785–91) and the Imam Shamil (1834–59), this literature argues that a continuity of struggle for national liberation links 18thand 19th-century

The Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism: A Case Study of the Editing of Stalin's 1938 Short Course on the History of the ACP(b)

Internationalism was a core element of early Bolshevik propaganda; despite the leadership’s growing pragmatism after the October 1917 revolution, the concept remained key to party self-representation. During the late 1930s, however, this engagement with internationalism atrophied – something traditionally explained as a sign of growing pragmatism, xenophobia and the threat of war. This article investigates this turnabout by examining how Stalin and key members of his ideological establishment altered their treatment of internationalism within what was to be the official treatment of the party’s historical experience, the infamous 1938 Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

Nationalist, heretic or populist?

I am grateful to Andreas Umland and David Marples for their thoughtful responses to my piece and appreciate the invitation of the editors of Nationalities Papers to briefly reply. Because “Stalin’s Populism” is an essay rather than an article devoted to empirical research, historiography or contemporary politics, some of the objections that Umland and Marples raise are a function of genre more than anything else. Other issues require more detailed engagement, however. As both responses indicate, “Stalin’s Populism” elaborates upon an argument that I’ve advanced in a number of places about the USSR’s rehabilitation of Russian historical heroes, imagery and iconography during the 1930s and 1940s. An enduring source of debate over the past half-century, this development has been variously attributed to Stalin’s retreat from world revolution, his low confidence in proletarian internationalism, his wavering commitment to Marxism and his insecurity during the Second World War. It’s also been seen as evidence of a turn toward nationalism and even fascism. I have long been frustrated by the schematicism of such accounts and offer here a more contingent interpretation situated specifically within the historical contours of the Stalinist 1930s. I have also grown frustrated by the hyperbole of the traditional literature’s focus on Stalin’s personal failings and ideological apostasy and suggest here that the policy changes in question display all the hallmarks of authoritarian populism, inasmuch as they advanced claims of Soviet state legitimacy and authority rather than Russian political autonomy or self-rule. Indeed, it is this official emphasis on party and state legitimacy and union-wide mobilization that leads me to use terms like “national Bolshevism” and russocentrism rather than Russian nationalism in regard to the Stalinist party line. My conclusion that Stalin’s populism accidentally gave rise to the emergence of a broad sense of Russian national identity in the USSR between the late 1930s and early 1950s explains why I’ve chosen Nationalities Papers as a forum for this publication. A study of unintended consequences, “Stalin’s Populism” addresses the potential for non-nationalist mobilizational rhetoric and imagery to precipitate the formation of a mass sense of national identity. In certain cases, the piece suggests, societies can mistake authoritarian appeals to patriotism, ethnocentrism, nativism and jingoism for grassroots nationalism, leading to the formation of communities entirely unimagined by their overlords. Ultimately, then, this article challenges the intentionalist assumptions that frequently govern the analysis of political entrepreneurship during the process of national identity formation. Andreas Umland takes my piece to task for failing to cite Mikhail Agursky’s and Erik van Ree’s work on national Bolshevism, overlooking van Ree’s own conclusions about the

Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. By Oleg V.Khlevniuk. Translated by NoraSeligman Favorov. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 408.

cal ambition and furthering her family’s prestige. Determined to be more than a pawn to traditional male authority, she gradually achieved and carefully held on to power and a charismatic royal persona by building upon tradition (e.g., following in the footsteps of Charlotte Lusignan, who preceded Caterina on the Cypriot throne; by taking advantage of the changing Mediterranean powerstructure; or by participating in Venetian civic rituals and supporting a gift economy meant to maintain her royal appearance in Asolo). Sections dealing with the continuous management of Caterina’s public image are most interesting. In chapter 3, the author details the queen’s self-fashioning post abdication. Through official documents and royal strategies, especially through gift exchange and commissioned chronicles and poems, she promoted a story of virtuous self-sacrifice in which her willing renunciation of the throne was entirely driven by her love for Venice. In chapter 6, Hurlburt considers the century after Caterina’s death in 1510, when preserving her prestigious memory was of utmost importance to the Corner family’s aggrandizing politics. Ritual commemoration presented the queen as a champion of her family, which consequently obscured Caterina’s personal achievements. Structured chronologically and anchored on new and underutilized archival documents, such as Caterina’s correspondence, the book is immediately engaging and will certainly satisfy the most scrupulous scholar and the casual history enthusiast. The glossary is helpful for entry-level students, while the thorough bibliography proves the wide range of research and interdisciplinary character of a book that participates in currently effervescent discussions of Mediterranean connectedness, and the role and agency of women in the early modern period.

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but in a calibrated manner. This more nuanced Kissinger, who has populated recent pioneering work from Jussi Hanhimäki, Jeremi Suri, Barbara Keys, and Roham Alvandi, is substantially more compatible with a set of global dislocations that were vastly more “upheaval” than “renewal.” In a testament to the equipoise of Sargent’s book, the two shepherd moons that have tended to bound 1970s scholarship—the rise of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which brought home the reality of an interdependent world, and the rapid ascent of transnational human rights concerns—are not given exaggerated weight. The flagship chapter, “Managing Interdependence,” a detailed analysis of mid-1970s globalism, encompassing the insurgency of the New International Economic Order and the dawning appreciation of the depth of shared planetary problems residing outside Cold War politics, has no direct peer in current scholarship. Around 1974, Sargent observes, “the sources of international danger and instability” were seemingly “shifting from Cold War geopolitics to the challenges of a globalizing world” (p. 186). Although the transient and frightening reassertion of the Cold War occluded this new arrangement for half a decade, Ford and Kissinger and later Carter and Brzezinski began to resolve, if only hazily, the transformative shifts that defined the future—even if they had little success in controlling them. This is an exceptionally thorough and eloquent history, of relevance not merely to historians of U.S. foreign relations but to scholars of international history, human rights, and globalization. The book maps the foundational moment when the contours of the 21st century came into being at a staccato, haphazard cadence. The sheer difficulty of assessing this reordering of the world, which was largely bereft of design and dominated by contingency and accident, is daunting. Sargent’s contribution, though perhaps not revolutionary in its analysis, will be a lodestar for future treatments of the period.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. 384 pp.

One of the earliest professionally-trained Marxist historians to be associated with the Russian revolutionary movement, M.N. Pokrovsky was enormously influential as a teacher, pedagogue and scholar. He was also a prominent administrator, serving as Deputy Commissar of the Enlightenment and head of the Communist Academy and Institute of the Red Professors from 1918 until his career was cut short by cancer in 1932. That said, his reputation outlived him by only four years before coming under a withering official assault in the days and weeks after 27 January, 1936. Much of the literature on the Stalinist state’s suppression of the so-called ‘Pokrovsky school’ contends that this campaign was the inevitable outcome of a ‘Great Retreat’ on the historical front that had been foreshadowed in party and state decrees since the early 1930s.1 Archival evidence, however, indicates that the shift caught many on the ground by surprise. A.V. Shestakov, one of the most prominent court historians of the Stalin period, was bombarded at public lectures during the late 1930s by questions from audience members struggling to understand the regime’s break with the materialist internationalism that Pokrovsky had popularised during the first 15 years of Soviet power.2 Some, recalling Lenin’s endorsement of the academician’s seminal Russian History in its Most Condensed Form.

35.00 / £24.95.

In September 1943, Josef Stalin invited three hierarchs from the Russian Orthodox Church to the Kremlin to discuss the future of the faith. According to one account, Metropolitan Sergii was unsure whether to wear church vestments to the meeting and decided in the end to wear civilian clothes instead. Stalin smiled knowingly upon seeing the future patriarch in such unpretentious attire and gestured toward the ceiling, commenting, “You’re more afraid of me than you are of him” (Boris Sokolov, “Dogovor s d’iavolom,” Novoe russkoe slovo, 4 September 2003, p. 6). Even if entirely apocryphal, this story captures the awkwardness of the meeting quite effectively. The Kremlin tête-à-tête and the iconoclastic revival of the Russian Orthodox Church that followed have long intrigued those writing about ideological change in the USSR under Stalin. Many believe that the concessions to the church were an exigency of war designed to increase the party’s ability to rally support from among even the most reluctant members of Soviet society. Others consider the revival of the church to have been part of a more thoroughgoing Russiacation of the USSR in the midto late 1930s that rehabilitated aspects of the Russian national past for mobilizational purposes well before 1941. In Stalin’s Holy War, Steven Merritt Miner proposes to reane such broad explanations through an analysis of the timing and nature of the church’s wartime resurgence. Noting that the church’s institutional resurrection occurred only in 1943 and that the vast majority of church reopenings occurred in formerly occupied territories in Ukraine and Belorussia, Miner argues that Russian Orthodoxy played a role that was more imperial and diplomatic than Russian per se. The church, as in tsarist times, served as an instrument of central control, helping the USSR consolidate gains made against the Germans after the victory at Stalingrad. As the Red Army reclaimed territory, Ukrainian and Belorussian parishes that had been reopened under the Nazis were turned over to the Moscow patriarchate in order to rein in communities that had been wrenched from the Soviet orbit in 1941. An institution of imperial administration, the church also took part in a diplomatic offensive launched at about the same time. This campaign used the church to court public opinion in the United States and Britain, reassuring the USSR’s erstwhile allies that Soviet society was not as militantly atheistic as many believed. Intriguingly, the massive publishing effort surrounding the church’s revival appears to have been intended chieoy for foreign consumption in order to assuage fears that the Red Army’s advance into Europe would serve purely Communist objectives. Miner is wise to draw attention to the revival of church institutions in 1943 and persuasively demonstrates that their bureaucratic power was harnessed to aid the Soviet cause in the former borderlands and abroad in the years thereafter. Somewhat less convincing is Miner’s tendency to downplay the role that the church played in domestic mobilizational efforts earlier in the war (pp. 6–11, 78–83, etc.). Recent research on the wane of anti-religious campaigns during the interwar period indicates