The first lecture in the Fall 2025 Havighurst Colloquium series, "Soviet Propaganda: History and Legacy" will feature David Brandenberger, who will focus on Stalinist propaganda.
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 fourth 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. His fifth book, Stalin’s Usable Past (Stanford University Press, 2024), is a critical edition of another key textbook to have been edited by the dictator on Russo-Soviet history. Brandenberger is presently writing a book on the 1949 Leningrad Affair, Stalin's last political purge.
