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  • Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War
  • Julie Kay Mueller
Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War. By Jeffrey Brooks (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000. xx plus 319pp. $35.00).

Readers of this journal should note that Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is not social history. Nevertheless, 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. Jeffrey Brooks’ underlying argument is that from the moment the Bolsheviks “seized the public lectern in October 1917” (xiii) they used the media, and newspapers in particular, to establish a new public culture, which, under Stalin, dominated public discourse, influenced society’s behavior, and, Brooks suggests, affected the possibilities of meaningful speech and thought, thereby exerting a powerful influence over society’s cognitive apparatus. As Brooks explains in his prologue, “The press was not coterminous with all public expression, but it contextualized the Soviet experience and imposed a structure on thinking even among nonbelievers...” (xiv).

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. The meticulous and extensive character of Brooks’ research is evident both from the plentiful statistical data (for example, on the frequency of the pronoun “we” in Pravda’s editorials between 1918 and 1940 [284, n. 103]) and from the myriad of citations and examples that support his arguments. On the other hand, Brooks did not conduct research in the previously closed Party archives that became accessible to Western scholars after the collapse of Soviet communism, and thus his book has not benefited from new archival evidence that might have more fully illuminated the intentions of those who created the newspapers or the reactions of those who read them—topics that are both of some consequence to Brooks’ analysis. [End Page 749]

The institutional foundations of the Bolshevik press monopoly were laid during the New Economic Policy (1921–28), but what Brooks refers to as “the performance” did not begin until Stalin consolidated his power and initiated the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32). The First Five-Year Plan promised Soviet citizens rapid improvement in their standards of living, and it did produce very high rates of economic growth and capital investment as well as some upward mobility. But implementation of the plan also caused massive—and often forced—demographic dislocation, the violent destruction of the rural socio-economic status quo, and universal shortages that culminated in famine. In these circumstances the Soviet press projected a “militant wishfulness” (xvi) and minimized its reportage of unfavorable news (for example, the central press did not report the 1932–33 famine). The only significant interruption in “the performance” occurred in the aftermath of the unexpected and devastating June 1941 Nazi attack on the U.S.S.R., when “[t]he official narrative fragmented under pressure of defeats” (175). Once the military tide was turned at Stalingrad, however, there was a gradual return to the pre-war “performance.” Despite some modification under Khrushchev, the press “retained much of [its] distinctive character” (xiv) until the introduction of glasnost’ by Gorbachev.

Brooks argues that the central leitmotif of the Soviet press was “the gift,” which symbolized the Soviet polity’s “moral economy” as well as the political status quo. Lenin initiated the “moral economy of the gift” when he cast his vanguard party in the role of “society’s benefactor” (83). Stalin’s claim to have created a socialist society enormously increased the magnitude of the gift: “after 1932, when the press hailed the plan as a success, praised the quality of Soviet life, and trumpeted grandiose rewards for achievers in various professions” (83), the Soviet people found themselves “permanently in debt” (84) to their beneficent leader, however hard they might work and study...

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