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2 - Victory Days

The War Theme in the Stalinist Commemorative Landscape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2021

Jonathan Brunstedt
Affiliation:
Texas A & M University
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Summary

This chapter examines victory in the war as an object of commemoration in late-Stalinist Moscow with an eye toward the paradoxical features of postwar commemorative culture. In particular, the analysis attempts to square a persistent, all-Soviet variant of the war narrative with the simultaneous public veneration of key events and personalities from the prerevolutionary Russian past. Rather than an ideological symbiosis, which seamlessly linked the war and the celebration of tsarist and other prerevolutionary accomplishments in a patriotic “double axis,” the chapter argues that postwar Soviet patriotism is better understood as an assemblage of disparate and contradictory, and at times highly fragmented, themes and images. Where the celebration of the Russian national past functioned to redirect and contain nationalistic impulses lest they disrupt the hierarchical integrity of the friendship of the peoples, representations of the war as a pan-Soviet event provided an alternative means of social mobilization amid the early Cold War, one that offset appeals to ethnic difference with a vision of a homogeneous Soviet people.

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Chapter
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The Soviet Myth of World War II
Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR
, pp. 72 - 115
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Victory Days
  • Jonathan Brunstedt, Texas A & M University
  • Book: The Soviet Myth of World War II
  • Online publication: 24 June 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595773.004
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Victory Days
  • Jonathan Brunstedt, Texas A & M University
  • Book: The Soviet Myth of World War II
  • Online publication: 24 June 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595773.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Victory Days
  • Jonathan Brunstedt, Texas A & M University
  • Book: The Soviet Myth of World War II
  • Online publication: 24 June 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595773.004
Available formats
×