The Making of a Stalinist Mythos: Politics, Bureaucracy, and Nation-Building in Soviet Historiography, 1939-1953
Open Access
- Author:
- Hizgilov, Daniel Rafael
- Area of Honors:
- History
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Tobias Heinrich Albert Brinkmann, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Cathleen Denise Cahill, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- historians
Stalin
Mythos
USSR
Historiography
Russia - Abstract:
- This thesis explores the intersection of politics, bureaucracy, and ideology on the Soviet historical front in the latter half of the Stalin period from 1939-1953. In formulating this topic, I was motivated by a personal interest in the society and culture that my family fled from in the 1970s and by an interest in the contemporary implications of political interjections into academia in contemporary nation-states. In my writing, I sought to understand how it was that the Soviet system was able to subordinate the production of academic historical research within a rigid ideological framework and to trace the artifacts of nation-building processes apparent in the work produced by the Soviet historians. I chose to focus on two historians as archetypal characters in the Stalinist Soviet drama: a dutiful soldier and a collaborator. In contrasting their experiences and opinions before, during, and after the Second World War, I hope to have provided a unique perspective to scholarship on Soviet academia. While I embarked on this project expecting to find a system of extensive state coercion, what I also uncovered was a web of human motivations and experiences that profoundly impacted the form Stalinist thought took. Stalinism did not happen in a vacuum; it was, in-part, facilitated by the ambitions and insecurities of the men and women who made up the academic establishment. The Russo-centric Soviet national identity crafted by these scholars appeared robust and yet was built on shoddy foundations. In hindsight, it is no surprise that this national ideal crumbled in the face of emergent nationalisms along the Soviet periphery and brought the Soviet ethno-federal system, and its inherent contradictions, down with it.