Translated by jesse savage
A nuanced historical analysis of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events of the period—beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding with the death of Stalin in March 1953. Late Stalinism analyses key cultural texts to trace the emergence of an imperial Soviet consciousness that still defines the political and cultural profile of modern Russia.
Late Stalinism is published by Yale University Press.
FIVE minutes with evgeny dobrenko
Evgeny Dobrenko is professor of Russian studies at the University of Sheffield, and co-director of the Prokhorov Centre for the Study of Central and Eastern European Intellectual and Cultural History. He previously worked at Odessa State University, Moscow State University, the Russian State University for the Humanities, Duke University, Stanford University, Amherst College, the University of California and the University of Nottingham. He was awarded the Efim Etkind Prize for the best book about Russian Culture in 2012 and the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship in 2019.
What is your background?
I have quite a payload! I was born in Odessa, moved to Moscow, worked at Moscow State University and the Russian State University of Humanities before emigrating almost 30 years ago. I moved to the US to work at Duke, Stanford, UC Irvine, Amherst College and NYU and then Nottingham and Sheffield in the UK. Now I have been appointed professor at the University of Venice. By background, I’m a philologist and my major field at the beginning was literary criticism. Intellectually, I have worked all my life on the same topic: Stalinist culture. When I started, there were literally three or four people in the world working on it. I have always been interdisciplinary and interested in social functions of literature.
Was it difficult working on Stalin as an academic?
In the Soviet Union, Stalinist culture was taboo after Stalin was denounced by Khrushchev in his secret speech. With perestroika, all my colleagues moved to study things that were banned in the Soviet Union - those writers you couldn’t previously write about. I moved in the opposite direction, because if the historical picture is not adequate without these banned authors, it’s equally not adequate without Stalin. It’s part of history but nobody wanted to do it. In the West, the Slavic field was created by a first wave of Russian immigrants who were on a mission to preserve what was destroyed by Bolsheviks. They didn’t like what was done in Soviet, and especially Stalin’s, times. It was almost impossible to build your academic career based on that.
What interested you about the topic?
There is a perception that it’s very bad art or pure propaganda. Lots of my colleagues cannot even accept the term Stalinist culture - it’s an oxymoron for them and to put together the two words “Stalinist aesthetics” is anathema. My colleagues said: “Why are you wasting your time listening to bad music and reading bad books?” I understand the difference between Pasternak and Soviet rubbish! I spent all my life reading rubbish. But if you see Russia today, you also understand how important it was to deal with these things. I feel I’m not a philologist who deals with art or literature. I’m like a doctor, and a nasty one - a proctologist or something. Somebody needs to do it.
What is the focus of your book?
Late Stalinism was the least explored part of the Stalin period. Historians were not interested because it was in the shadow of the earlier, more important and dynamic periods of Russian history linked to violence: revolution, collectivisation, famine, the gulag, the war. But mostly of the system’s influence was achieved through soft power, through culture. It was central to promoting totalitarian ideology. You can’t do much with open violence. You need nice gloves to choke someone with. Stalin was very aware of this and focused on cultural things. I’ve tried to write a book about that. The great composers, writers, poets, film directors were all part of the machine of Stalinist culture. The majority of its artists were third rate, but great people participated too. The art was consumed by millions of people. Historically, literature in Russia the only place to discuss national problems and issues. Culture was critically important for the regime to advance, to promote its agenda and for people to internalise it.
What surprised you in researching your book?
What I’ve realised is that if you look at the foundations of Stalin’s political philosophy, his aesthetics were the same as his political views. Some people think these are separate and distinct, but I argue that all the foundations of socialist realism and Stalinist aesthetics are reflected directly in Stalin’s politics. The major cultural issues coincide with the major political events - the Cold War, the Doctors’ Plot, the antisemitic campaigns, the Lysenko anti-genetics debate: they align with Stalinist cultural views. Politics merges with aesthetics. They dovetail completely.
How relevant is studying these issues today?
Thank god I didn’t write this book as I originally planned 35 years ago or it would have been just one of those historical books about something that happened long ago. This is a pre-history of today’s Russia. In the whole post-Stalin period, all the leaders who replaced him worked with what he created, in reforming it, destalinising and restalinising the state. Stalin is the centrepiece of modern Russian history. He is the father of the Soviet nation and I think also of the post-Soviet nation. Putin is Stalin-lite. He’s as nasty as Stalin, it’s just that he lives in a different country and world, with a different social dynamic and educational level. He is a classical product of the Soviet nation, and the Soviet nation is the result of Stalin. To understand today’s resentment, anti-liberalism and anti-westernism, you need to go back to the late Stalinist period. People are nostalgic for the USSR but can’t point out exactly why. It certainly wasn’t because of the repressions, the famines or the deficits of the Brezhnev era. The pinnacle of the golden age was late Stalinism. Now the train of the Russian state is on the same track but moving backwards. You know exactly what will happen.
How did you produce the book?
The Russian version came out a few months after the British edition, but I consider it to be translated from Russian into English, with some details cut out which would be confusing or less interesting for non-Russian readers. It was very important to have an affordable Russian edition. I have a very good translator [Jesse Savage] and editor who took care of the English text.
What is your next book?
I’m already working on the proofs. It’s on “state laughter” - on state-approved self-criticism. Laughter was appropriated by the Soviet state. You can’t laugh at the state so the state took care of that and ran the show itself, trying to change its own image.
INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)
REVIEWS
“Late Stalinism is both unsettling and hard to ignore. Dobrenko argues that Stalin’s all-encompassing ethnic Russianness rooted deeply in everything from literature and philosophy to film, linguistics, and even biology; that it redefined national identity in the Soviet era and has now germinated anew in Putin’s Russia. This book promises to stimulate debate about the country’s past, present, and future.”—Jeffrey Brooks, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks
"Dobrenko has produced a magisterial study of Soviet culture in the 1940s, to him the most truly Stalinist period. This is a much more sophisticated and original interpretation of the decade than we have seen to date, and it will be essential reading for all those interested in Soviet history and culture."—Katerina Clark, Yale University
