Dr. David Brandenberger

Assistant Professor of History
328 Ryland Hall
Office: (804) 289-8667
Fax: (804) 287-1992

http://oncampus.richmond.edu/~dbranden/

David Brandenberger has written on Stalin-era propaganda, ideology and nationalism in journals like Russian Review, Kritika, Europe-Asia Studies, Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas and Voprosy istorii.  His first book, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956, focuses on the USSR's reliance on russocentric mobilizational propaganda and the effect that this pragmatic use of historical heroes, imagery and iconography had on national consciousness among Russian-speakers, both during the Stalin period and after.  His second book, an interdisciplinary edited volume entitled Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, elaborates on many of these themes in its examination of the Stalin regime's co-option of canonical classics from Pushkin and Lermontov to Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible.  Brandenberger is presently working on a third book, Propaganda State: Stalinist Ideology, Terror and Political Indoctrination, 1928-1939, which explores the USSR's failure to inculcate a sense of communist identity in interwar Soviet society--a failure that precipitated the mobilizational exigencies detailed in his other published work.

Teaching:
Russia, Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Nationalism, Propaganda, Mass Culture, Film

Research:
Soviet Union, Ideology, Nationalism, Propaganda, Literature, Film

Education:
Harvard University, A.M., Ph.D.

Selected Publications:
Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (co-edited with Kevin M. F. Platt) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

"Stalin as Symbol: a Case Study of the Cult of Personality and its Construction," in Stalin: a New History, edited by Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249-270.

"Stalin, the Leningrad Affair, and the Limits of Postwar Russocentrism," Russian Review 63:2 (2004): 241-255.

"Stalin's Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Anti-Semitism and the Doctors' Plot," Kritika 6:1 (2005): 187-204.
 
"Imagined Community? Rethinking the Nationalist Origins of the Contemporary Chechen Crisis" (co-authored with Ehren Park), Kritika 5:3 (2004): 543-560.

National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).