David Brandenberger
Biographic Data
| ID | 1076393 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Brandenberger |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Brandenberger |
| SIGNATURE | BRANDENBERGER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Richmond |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1466-4601 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“Your Hands, Malenkov, Are Covered in Blood…”
This article analyzes how the Leningrad Affair, one of the most poorly understood of Joseph Stalin’s purges, was weaponized by Nikita Khrushchev and his comrades‐in‐arms in order to consolidate power during the 1950s and early 1960s. An exposé of how Khrushchev accused four different people of being responsible for the purge over the span of just four years, it offers new insight into several aspects of post‐Stalin high politics. First, it demons…
Public Memory in the USSR and Soviet Myths about World War II
Jonathan Brunstedt, The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Editor's Introduction: This book by Jonathan Brunstedt of Texas A&M University, looking at changing notions of patriotism and national identity in the Soviet Union as reflected in public commemorations of the USSR's role in the Second World War, raises a host of intriguing issues regarding So…
Basically, it’s a History of the Russian State”
Joseph Stalin and the Soviet party leadership launched a major propaganda campaign in 1931 that called for a new approach to Soviet history, not only for scholars and pedagogues but for society as a whole. A veritable “search for a usable past,” this initiative was to bolster the authority and legitimacy of the state and rally the population together in patriotic unity by connecting the prerevolutionary past to the Stalinist present. When this ne…
Election Integrity” in a One-Party Dictatorship
In 1949, Stalin and his comrades-in-arms were rocked by allegations of voter fraud at a recent Leningrad party conference. Investigations soon revealed the conference’s electoral commission to have zeroed-out all the votes cast against the leaders of the Leningrad party organization. Outrage within the all-union party leadership in Moscow quickly transformed this scandal into one of the major catalysts for the last major political purge of the St…
What Caused the Fall of Nikolai A. Voznesenskii? The Gosplan Affair, the Leningrad Affair and Political Infighting in Stalin's Inner Circle, 1949-1950
The 1949-1952 Gosplan Affair is rarely mentioned in the literature on late Stalinism, insofar as this purge of Politburo member Nikolai A. Voznesenskii and his clients at the USSR Council of Ministers Economic Planning Committee (Gosplan) is usually conflated with the coterminous Leningrad Affair. According to most scholars, Voznesenskii played a role in Andrei A. Zhdanov's Leningrad patron-client network, which was purged after the death of its …
Stalin and the Silences of the Official History of His Role in the Prerevolutionary Bolshevik Underground
At the height of his cult of personality in 1938, Stalin deleted almost all references to his prerevolutionary career within the Bolshevik underground from the canonical Short Course on party history. Recognizing the challenge that this editing poses to traditional understandings of the personality cult, this article analyzes Stalin’s excisions from this all-important text and then looks to recent research by Ronald Grigor Suny, Stephen Kotkin, E…
J effrey B rooks . The Firebird and the Fox
In his pathbreaking 1985 book, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917, Jeffrey Brooks argues that a modern sense of Russian cultural identity took shape during the last decades of Romanov rule as literacy and print culture expanded beyond the elite to include more and more of the empire’s diverse society. One of Brooks’s key observations in the book is that this process involved more than just the classics of nine…
Letters
Global and Transnational in Form, Soviet in Content
The term "internationalism" underwent a series of dramatic, semantic transformations in the USSR between 1917 and 1991. This article offers a Begriffsgeschichte-style analysis of the conceptual history of the term, tracking its usage in the official press over the course of the Soviet Union's existence. Such a broad, systematic survey indicates that internationalism was used with considerable rigor in official messaging as it was invoked over and…
In this issue
Daniel Stotland, Purity and Compromise in the Soviet Party-State
The Rise and Fall of a Crimean Party Boss
This essay focuses on the career of N. V. Solov’ev, a prominent Stalin-era official and little-known victim of the 1949 Leningrad Affair. When treated as a case study, Solov’ev’s life and times illustrate a variety of important things about Stalinism as a whole. Most obviously, Solov’ev’s rapid ascent into the party nomenklatura during the interwar years exemplifies the dramatic trajectory that many in party service enjoyed during this period. On…
Not According to Plan
In many senses, cinema ought to have been a key medium of communication for the Soviet propaganda state. Already a central element of urban mass culture in bourgeois society on the eve of the 1917
Propaganda State in Crisis
The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, schools, and cultural forums from literature and cinema to the fine arts. Yet party propagandists were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts to promote a coherent sense of "Soviet" identity during the interwar years. This book investigates this failure to mobilize society along communist lines…
Stalin's Rewriting of 1917
As the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution approaches, even a casual survey of the literature reveals scores of accounts of the Bolshevik seizure of power, written by commentators, participants and eyewitnesses from all across the political spectrum. Indeed, it seems as if no sooner had the Bolsheviks managed to seize power on the streets of revolutionary Petrograd than a new struggle began on the printed page to define the nature and…
The Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism
Internationalism was a core element of early Bolshevik propaganda; despite the leadership's growing pragmatism after the October 1917 revolution, the concept remained key to party self-representation. During the late 1930s, however, this engagement with internationalism atrophied – something traditionally explained as a sign of growing pragmatism, xenophobia and the threat of war. This article investigates this turnabout by examining how Stalin a…
Crossing Borders
Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pitt Russian and East European Studies)." Revolutionary Russia, 29(2), pp. 239–240
Stephen Kotkin. Stalin, Volume I
Over the course of the past quarter-century, Stephen Kotkin has made a number of agenda-setting contributions to the study of the Stalin period. Particularly notable are his Foucault-inspired study of Magnitogorsk (Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization [1995]) and his comparative corrective to Soviet exceptionalism (“Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika 2, no. 1 [2001]: 111–164). In Stalin: Paradoxes of Pow…
Debates over the 1949 ‘Leningrad Affair’ in the Contemporary Russian Popular Press
Sergei Kremlev, Zachem ubili Stalina? Prestuplenie veka. Moscow: Yauza, Eskmo, 2008, 480pp., 237 rubles.V. D. Kuznechevskii, ‘Leningradskoe delo’: Naivnaya popytka sozdat’ etnicheski chistoe russkoe pravitel’stvo byla utoplena v krovi. Moscow: Rossiiskii institut strategicheskikh issledovanii, 2013, 84pp., 207 rubles.Sigizmund Mironin, Stalinskii poryadok. Moscow: Algoritm, 2007, 272pp., 126 rubles.Elena Prudnikova, 1953—Rokovoi god sovetskoi ist…
Stalin's Answer to the National Question
As a cornerstone of early Bolshevik propaganda, nationality policy allowed the revolutionary regime to cast the Soviet "experiment" as emancipatory in both ethnic and class terms. Paradoxically, much of the attention paid to the national question vanished from the party canon in 1938, for reasons that have never been fully explained. In this article we investigate this dramatic turnabout by examining how party historians and Iosif Stalin himself …
Making Sense as a Cultural Practice
The production of sense is a central field of action of cultural and political practice. The articles examine how, in different contexts, the construction of sense and its outcome as a cultural practice
Showcasing the Great Experiment
Motherland in Danger
Stalinist Society, 1928–1953, by Mark Edele
Journal Article Stalinist Society, 1928–1953, by Mark Edele Get access Stalinist Society, 1928–1953, by Mark Edele ( Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2011; pp. 367. 50). David Brandenberger David Brandenberger University of Richmond, VA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 529, December 2012, Pages 1585–1587, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ces264 Published: 26 November 2012
Stalin's Last Generation
This monograph focuses on the historical experience of an important Soviet generational grouping that has long been eclipsed by better-known age cohorts. Most famous was the generation defined by the events of 1917, whose decisions whether or not to side with the Bolsheviks contributed heavily to identity formation at the mass level. The next generation was similarly defined by the epic struggle of the Second World War, which, in Soviet parlance,…
The people need a tsar’
IN A SIGNIFICANT DEPARTURE from the materialist proletarian internationalism characteristic of the first 15 years of Soviet rule, the role of the state, individual and Russian ethnos underwent a major rehabilitation in the mid-to-late 1930s. While it would be rather simplistic to accept N. Timasheff's description of this ideological transformation as a 'great retreat',1 the era's flux in state ideology is as dramatic as it is puzzling. Although s…
Global and Transnational in Form, Soviet in Content
The term "internationalism" underwent a series of dramatic, semantic transformations in the USSR between 1917 and 1991. This article offers a Begriffsgeschichte-style analysis of the conceptual history of the term, tracking its usage in the official press over the course of the Soviet Union's existence. Such a broad, systematic survey indicates that internationalism was used with considerable rigor in official messaging as it was invoked over and…
Stalin's populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity
This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array o…
Stalin, the Leningrad Affair, and the Limits of Postwar Soviet Russocentrism
Stalin's Answer to the National Question
As a cornerstone of early Bolshevik propaganda, nationality policy allowed the revolutionary regime to cast the Soviet "experiment" as emancipatory in both ethnic and class terms. Paradoxically, much of the attention paid to the national question vanished from the party canon in 1938, for reasons that have never been fully explained. In this article we investigate this dramatic turnabout by examining how party historians and Iosif Stalin himself …
Terribly Romantic, Terribly Progressive, or Terribly Tragic
The Rise and Fall of a Crimean Party Boss
This essay focuses on the career of N. V. Solov’ev, a prominent Stalin-era official and little-known victim of the 1949 Leningrad Affair. When treated as a case study, Solov’ev’s life and times illustrate a variety of important things about Stalinism as a whole. Most obviously, Solov’ev’s rapid ascent into the party nomenklatura during the interwar years exemplifies the dramatic trajectory that many in party service enjoyed during this period. On…
The Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism
Internationalism was a core element of early Bolshevik propaganda; despite the leadership's growing pragmatism after the October 1917 revolution, the concept remained key to party self-representation. During the late 1930s, however, this engagement with internationalism atrophied – something traditionally explained as a sign of growing pragmatism, xenophobia and the threat of war. This article investigates this turnabout by examining how Stalin a…
Showcasing the Great Experiment
Who killed Pokrovskii? (the second time)
The public denunciation of M.N. Pokrovskii on 27 January 1936, epitomised a major Soviet ideological shift under way from the 1920s’ focus on materialist internationalism to the late 1930s’ tendency toward russocentric statism. Many scholars — most notably M.V. Nechkina ‐ have argued that this campaign was orchestrated by I.V. Stalin. Archival materials, however, reveal that the start of the anti‐Pokrovskii campaign was considerably more complica…
The people need a tsar’
IN A SIGNIFICANT DEPARTURE from the materialist proletarian internationalism characteristic of the first 15 years of Soviet rule, the role of the state, individual and Russian ethnos underwent a major rehabilitation in the mid-to-late 1930s. While it would be rather simplistic to accept N. Timasheff's description of this ideological transformation as a 'great retreat',1 the era's flux in state ideology is as dramatic as it is puzzling. Although s…
Who killed Pokrovskii? (the second time)
The public denunciation of M.N. Pokrovskii on 27 January 1936, epitomised a major Soviet ideological shift under way from the 1920s’ focus on materialist internationalism to the late 1930s’ tendency toward russocentric statism. Many scholars — most notably M.V. Nechkina ‐ have argued that this campaign was orchestrated by I.V. Stalin. Archival materials, however, reveal that the start of the anti‐Pokrovskii campaign was considerably more complica…
"The People's Poet"
Proletarian Internationalism, "Soviet Patriotism" and the Rise of Russocentric Etatism During the Stalinist 1930s
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
Stalinism in a Russian Province
Industry, State and Society in Stalin's Russia, 1926-1934
The Unknown Lenin
Was Lenin a visionary whose ideals were subverted by his followers? Or was he a cynical misanthrope, even crueler than Stalin? This book, which contains documents from Lenin archive in Russia, lays bare Lenin man and politician, leaving little doubt that he was a ruthless and manipulative leader who used terror, subversion, and persecution to achieve his goals. Edited and introducted by Richard Pipes in collaboration with Y.A. Buranov of Russian …
Terribly Romantic, Terribly Progressive, or Terribly Tragic
Reinventing Russia
Valery Tishkov, Chechnya
The present volume, an abbreviated translation of Valery Tishkov’s Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte: Etnografiia chechenskoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), offers a sophisticated analysis of Chechen society during the 1990s, contextualizing a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, undermined the stability of the North Caucasus and hobbled Russia’s transition from a Soviet republic to a modern, democratic state. The director of th…
Ideology and Politics (or Vice Versa)
Stalin, the Leningrad Affair, and the Limits of Postwar Soviet Russocentrism
Stalin’s Empire of Memory
"Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination, by Serhy Yekelchyk." Canadian Journal of History, 40(1), pp. 120–121
Epic Revisionism
Stalin
Stalin's populism and the accidental creation of Russian national identity
This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array o…
Nationalist, heretic or populist
I am grateful to Andreas Umland and David Marples for their thoughtful responses to my piece and appreciate the invitation of the editors of Nationalities Papers to briefly reply. Because “Stalin's Populism” is an essay rather than an article devoted to empirical research, historiography or contemporary politics, some of the objections that Umland and Marples raise are a function of genre more than anything else. Other issues require more detaile…
Stalin's Genocides, by Norman M. Naimark
In a fitting inversion of his notorious personality cult, Joseph Stalin has been vilified with an array of explosive epithets since 1956—from tyrant and autocrat to despot and dictator. Norman Naimark now argues that ‘genocidaire’ ought to be added to this list. Naimark makes his case by beginning with a brief survey of the historical origins of the term ‘genocide’, followed by an equally brief character sketch of Stalin himself. He then offers a…
Stalinist Society, 1928–1953, by Mark Edele
Journal Article Stalinist Society, 1928–1953, by Mark Edele Get access Stalinist Society, 1928–1953, by Mark Edele ( Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2011; pp. 367. 50). David Brandenberger David Brandenberger University of Richmond, VA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 529, December 2012, Pages 1585–1587, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ces264 Published: 26 November 2012
Stalin's Last Generation
This monograph focuses on the historical experience of an important Soviet generational grouping that has long been eclipsed by better-known age cohorts. Most famous was the generation defined by the events of 1917, whose decisions whether or not to side with the Bolsheviks contributed heavily to identity formation at the mass level. The next generation was similarly defined by the epic struggle of the Second World War, which, in Soviet parlance,…
Making Sense as a Cultural Practice
The production of sense is a central field of action of cultural and political practice. The articles examine how, in different contexts, the construction of sense and its outcome as a cultural practice
Showcasing the Great Experiment
Motherland in Danger
Stalin's Answer to the National Question
As a cornerstone of early Bolshevik propaganda, nationality policy allowed the revolutionary regime to cast the Soviet "experiment" as emancipatory in both ethnic and class terms. Paradoxically, much of the attention paid to the national question vanished from the party canon in 1938, for reasons that have never been fully explained. In this article we investigate this dramatic turnabout by examining how party historians and Iosif Stalin himself …
Debates over the 1949 ‘Leningrad Affair’ in the Contemporary Russian Popular Press
Sergei Kremlev, Zachem ubili Stalina? Prestuplenie veka. Moscow: Yauza, Eskmo, 2008, 480pp., 237 rubles.V. D. Kuznechevskii, ‘Leningradskoe delo’: Naivnaya popytka sozdat’ etnicheski chistoe russkoe pravitel’stvo byla utoplena v krovi. Moscow: Rossiiskii institut strategicheskikh issledovanii, 2013, 84pp., 207 rubles.Sigizmund Mironin, Stalinskii poryadok. Moscow: Algoritm, 2007, 272pp., 126 rubles.Elena Prudnikova, 1953—Rokovoi god sovetskoi ist…
Political science (38 works) · Law (32 works) · History (31 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (25 works) · Politics (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Soviet and Russian History (22 works) · Law (21 works) · History (17 works) · Art (14 works)