Tepper Lecture Series “Empire and Memory”
Tepper Lecture Series “Empire and Memory”
First of Tepper lecture series will take a place on Septeember 19 at 5 pm in Tucker Hlal 127A; Our guest, David Brandenberger, Professor of History from University of Richmond will give a talk titled: "'Stalin's Master Narrative': The General Secretary's Rewriting of Party History in the 1938 Short Course."
David Brandenberger has written on Stalin-era propaganda, ideology and nationalism in journals like Russian Review, Slavic Review, Kritika, Revolutionary Russia, Nationality Papers, Europe-Asia Studies, Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii 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. His forth book, Stalin’s Master Narrative (Yale, 2019), is a co-edited critical edition of the general secretary’s infamous 1938 party history textbook. He is presently writing a book on the 1949 Leningrad Affair, Stalin's last political purge, and co-editing the purge-era diary of a high-ranking member of the USSR’s Politburo.
