The Soviet Myth of World War II

This pioneering monograph – a Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year – asks how a socialist society, ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle, reconciled itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war. 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 state historical narratives reinforced a sense of Russian primacy and Russian dominated 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.