Jeffrey Brooks is Professor of European History at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of When Russia Learned
to Read (Princeton), which won the Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies,
and of many articles on Russian and Soviet culture and politics.
Summary
Thank you, our Stalin, for a happy childhood." "Thank you, dear Marshal [Stalin], for our freedom,
for our children's happiness, for life." Between the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, Soviet public culture
was so dominated by the power of the state that slogans like these appeared routinely in newspapers, on posters,
and in government proclamations. In this penetrating historical study, Jeffrey Brooks draws on years of research
into the most influential and widely circulated Russian newspapers--including Pravda, Isvestiia, and the army paper
Red Star--to explain the origins, the nature, and the effects of this unrelenting idealization of the state, the
Communist Party, and the leader.
Brooks shows how, beginning with Lenin, the Communists established a state monopoly of the media that absorbed
literature, art, and science into a stylized and ritualistic public culture--a form of political performance that
became its own reality and excluded other forms of public reflection. He presents and explains scores of self-congratulatory
newspaper articles, including tales of Stalin's supposed achievements and virtue, accounts of the country's allegedly
dynamic economy, and warnings about the decadence and cruelty of the capitalist West. Brooks pays particular attention
to the role of the press in the reconstruction of the Soviet cultural system to meet the Nazi threat during World
War II and in the transformation of national identity from its early revolutionary internationalism to the ideology
of the Cold War. He concludes that the country's one-sided public discourse and the pervasive idea that citizens
owed the leader gratitude for the "gifts" of goods and services led ultimately to the inability of late
Soviet Communism to diagnose its own ills, prepare alternative policies, and adjust to new realities.
The first historical work to explore the close relationship between language and the implementation of the Stalinist-Leninist
program, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! is a compelling account of Soviet public culture as reflected through the country's
press.