Location: Robinson lower library
Speaker Bio: David Brandenberger has written on Stalin-era propaganda, ideology and nationalism in journals like Russian Review, Kritika, Nationality Papers, Europe-Asia Studies, Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas and Voprosy istorii. His first book, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Harvard, 2002), focuses on the USSR's reliance on russocentric mobilizational propaganda and the effect that this pragmatic use of historical heroes, imagery and iconography had on national consciousness among Russian-speakers, both during the Stalin period and after. His second book, an interdisciplinary co-edited volume titled Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin, 2006), elaborates on many of these themes in its examination of the Stalin regime's co-option of canonical classics from Pushkin and Lermontov to Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. His third book, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1928-1941 (Yale, 2011), explores the USSR's failure to inculcate a sense of communist identity in interwar Soviet society—a failure that precipitated the mobilizational exigencies detailed in his earlier books. At present, Brandenberger is preparing a critical edition of Stalin’s infamous party history textbook, The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) for Yale University Press.
For more: http://history.richmond.edu/faculty/dbranden/