Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution--figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov--"Epic Revisionism" tells the fascinating story of these individuals' return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. An inherently interdisciplinary project, "Epic Revisionism" features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources--newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories--to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history.
"These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system."--David L. Hoffmann, "Slavic Review"

The USSR is often regarded as the world's first propaganda state. Particularly under Stalin, politically charged rhetoric and imagery dominated the press, the schools, and the 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 by probing the secrets of the party's ideological establishment and indoctrinational system. An expose of systemic failure within Stalin's ideological establishment, "Propaganda State in Crisis" ultimately rewrites the history of Soviet indoctrination and mass mobilization between 1927 and 1941.