Suchergebnisse

How did a socialist society, ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle, reconcile itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war? In this provocative new history, Jonathan Brunstedt pursues this question 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 the experience and legacy of the conflict did much to reinforce 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-Russinan 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 books sheds new ligth 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.

Influential scholarship on the Brezhnev era has described the instrumental official support for Russian nationalist themes and pre-socialist imagery in public discourse as a deliberate "politics of inclusion," designed to co-opt certain nationalist intellectuals and the sympathies of the state's core of ethnic Russians for the purpose of popular mobilization. How this policy related to and interacted with the ubiquitous official commemoration and mythologization of the Great Fatherland War during this period, however, has remained unexplored. Based on a number of the most important Russophilic publications in the censored press - the writings of the so-called "Chalmaevists" - this article contends that despite unambiguously russocentric, single-stream readings of history in general, when it came to the war in particular, nationalist intellectuals tended to muffle their russocentrism through opaque language or an avoidance of the war's larger significance, or conformed to the war's official (supra-ethnic, socialist) reading. It was only in samizdat that the essentially Russian, primordial nature of victory in 1945 could be fully articulated. The present study thus probes the limits of the concept of inclusionary politics and underscores the party leadership's apparent commitment to maintaining the war myth's predominantly supranational, socialist significance as a means of fostering all-Soviet, rather than Russian national, solidarity.

AbstractThis article examines the evolution of official Soviet remembrance of the Second World War in the decades that followed 1945. Focusing on elite discourse and Komsomol military-patriotic curricula associated with the state cult of the war, the article argues that Soviet remembrance promoted the war as a fundamentally supranational experience and the basis for a transcendent, pan-Soviet imagined community. The article questions an influential scholarly position that emphasizes the party leadership's reliance on pre-socialist, russocentric imagery for popular mobilization. In fact, official remembrance practices after Stalin were most striking in the extent to which they consistently downplayed Russian exceptionalism for the sake of the paramount Soviet whole. The article proposes that this tendency should be viewed as part of a larger, internally contested effort to move away from a distinct ethnic hierarchy, and toward a picture of non-ethnic, pan-Soviet uniformity.