Public Memory in the USSR and Soviet Myths about World War II

Jonathan Brunstedt, The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Editor's Introduction: This book by Jonathan Brunstedt of Texas A&M University, looking at changing notions of patriotism and national identity in the Soviet Union as reflected in public commemorations of the USSR's role in the Second World War, raises a host of intriguing issues regarding Soviet history and the Cold War. We asked three distinguished experts to offer appraisals of Brunstedt's book. Their assessments are published here seriatim, along with a reply by Brunstedt.Jonathan Brunstedt's The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR offers an unusually nuanced approach to understanding the striking power of the myth of the war in the USSR after 1945.1 Beginning with a thorough overview of the relevant historiography, Brunstedt analyzes how Soviet officialdom characterized the USSR's wartime experience through two legends that seem at first glance to be mutually exclusive. The first of these—the myth of Soviet Russocentrism—dwells on the pivotal leadership role the Russian people supposedly played in the war, combining centuries of historical experience with acumen, altruism, and self-sacrifice. The second myth—that of the pan-Soviet people—celebrates how a restive and divided young society mustered the ideological unity necessary to win a brutal war of attrition.Perhaps the greatest contribution of The Soviet Myth of World War II is the way Brunstedt treats the contradictions inherent to this mythology. In his telling, Soviet wartime propaganda and postwar commemorative practices varied widely in place, space, and time. This variation allowed a variety of agitators and propagandists to highlight a variety of issues in front of a variety of audiences. Although this complex approach to propaganda sometimes created a cacophony of competing rallying calls, Brunstedt argues that party leaders not only tolerated the contradictions but at times even cultivated them.An intriguing model of deliberate ideological dynamism, the book avoids many of the pitfalls of more static propaganda paradigms. It outlines a type of mobilizational realism in the USSR in which state and society operated in dialogue with each other. It suggests that Soviet ideologists were aware of both the diversity of their society and the limitations of their agitprop outreach. Brunstedt rejects the tall tales of a truly monolithic model of Soviet ideological messaging that were told by the party and then mythologized thereafter by several generations of analysts.Brunstedt posits three elements of this heretofore underappreciated ideological dynamism. First, he takes a close look at the eternal “Russian question.” Here, Brunstedt follows other recent scholars to argue that, particularly under Stalin, Soviet party leaders embraced an inherently non-nationalist sense of Russocentrism. This Russocentrism allowed them to endorse a sense of Russian linguistic, cultural, and historical primacy in Soviet society without allowing the Russian nation sovereignty, self-rule, or any of the privileges that might go with true nationalism. Instead, the Russians were cast as the ever-altruistic primus inter pares on account of their generosity in regard to the broader Soviet family of nations.2Second, Brunstedt examines the nature of the “pan-Soviet people”—a rather artificial and sometimes awkward construct that was simultaneously not only supra-ethnic and multiethnic but also federal and centrally led. Continuously formulated and reformulated after the introduction of the concept in the mid-1930s, the phrase remained subject to constant modulation and renegotiation even after it was formally defined by Nikita Khrushchev in 1961.3 Such semantic dynamism, according to Brunstedt, kept Soviet wartime propaganda and postwar commemorative messaging flexible and inclusive.Third, Brunstedt points to the existence of an unusually multivalent sort of Soviet internationalism. Internationalist in terms of global reach and aspirations abroad, this concept at home celebrated ethnic diversity by promoting pluralism and “inter-national” ties between the various Soviet national groups. 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