Myth, Memory, Trauma

Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70

Jones Polly

Drawing on newly available materials from the Soviet archives, Polly Jones offers an innovative, comprehensive account of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras. Jones traces the authorities' initiation and management of the de-Stalinization process and explores a wide range of popular reactions to the new narratives of Stalinism in party statements and in Soviet literature and historiography. Engaging with the dynamic field of memory studies, this book represents the first sustained comparison of this process with other countries' attempts to rethink their own difficult pasts, and with later Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to Stalinism.

About the Author

Polly Jones is the Schrecker-Barbour Fellow and University Lecturer in Russian at University College, University of Oxford. She lives in London.

Reviews

"Jones' excellent, nuanced, and empirically-rich book requires us to re-think, in important and surprising ways, our understandings of de-Stalinization, of the nature of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, of the relationship between 'official' and 'popular' memory, and of Soviet exceptionalism" – Anne Gorsuch, author of "All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad" (Oxford 2012)

Back to the list of books