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Book

The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR

The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR cover and title

Publisher

Cambridge University Press, 2021

ISBN

9781108498753
The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR cover and title

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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 exceptionalism and Russian-led 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.

About the Author

Image_Jonathan_Brunstedt

Jonathan Brunstedt

Former Title VIII Research Scholar;
Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M University
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