Thank You, Comrade Stalin!

“Long before the words ‘politically correct’ entered our vocabulary, Lenin and his associates set about installing an altogether steelier and more suffocating notion of ‘political literacy.’ By every means, down to censoring the content on matchbook covers, the Bolsheviks declared the minds of the people their possession to mold as they chose… With unmatched thoroughness and persistence, [the Bolsheviks] brought to heel the press, theater, art, film, and every other form of public culture. Brooks meticulously surveys the process by which this was done and the product it yielded.”–Foreign Affairs “Brooks provide[s] the perfect backdrop to the Koestleresque drama of the Moscow trials.”–George Walden, Times Literary Supplement “[Brooks] tells a tightly spun tale about Cold War Soviet life… Thorough and cogent…”–Library Journal “Soviet history has its own specificity. The student of Soviet literature must be a historian and political scientist and the historian involentarily becomes a philologist. Jeffrey Brooks is rich in this experience… As Brooks shows, Soviet society and the stalinist epoch existed in a fantasy world of ideological construction not only because the authorities ‘concealed the truth’ and ‘censored brutally,’ but because through the press, literature, and art ‘there was created a stylized, ritualized, and self-reflexive public culture which produced its own reality, supplanting all other forms of expression.’ … Brooks happens to be both a knowledgeable and sensitive guide to the upside down world which appeared in the pages of Soviet newspapers and magazines.”–Evgenii Dobrenko, Novyi Mir (New World, the leading Soviet literary journal) “The book’s central theme carries crushing weight. At least for a time, a regime can define reality. Brooks instructs most by reminding that Newspeak is old news, that a properly orchestrated public culture can creep, kudzu-like, through private thought.”–Susan McWilliams, Boston Review “[Brooks] invites us to ponder how the cultural dimension can be understood. The stimulating quality of his insights will surely provoke valuable debate.”–Laura Englestein, American Historical Review “This rich and compelling study of the genesis and development of official public culture in the Soviet Union has significant implications for our understanding of Soviet society… While Brooks is certainly not the first to discuss the important consequences of the Bolshevik press monopoly, he has undoubtedly read and sampled the early Soviet press more systematically, more rigorously, and over a longer time interval than any other historian, and his book provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the text and illustrations that appeared in the Soviet Union’s most influential national newspapers between 1917 and 1953.”–Julie Kay Mueller, Journal of Social History “This book provides a vivid and systematic analysis of the techniques used by the Soviet leadership to build a nation unified in service to the state.”–Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics “Thank You, Comrade Stalin is a landmark study–and a profoundly moral book.”–Eric Naiman, Slavic and East European Journal

Jeffrey Brooks is Professor of European History at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton), which won the Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and of many articles on Russian and Soviet culture and politics.