Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia

Wellesley history professor Tumarkin ( Lenin Lives! ) here explains how Stalin and his successors glorified the Soviet war against Nazi Germany by orchestrating a sanitized myth of heroic triumph intended to foster support for the Communist Party and an ailing economic system. The cult of the Great Patriotic War, she demonstrates, concealed the U.S.S.R.'s disastrous unpreparedness for the 1941 German invasion, which cost 30 million Soviet lives. Stalin's murder of tens of thousands of Soviet military commanders in a purge on the eve of the war, his use of the war as a pretext to crush dissent and nationalist separatisms and his scorched-earth policy are also omitted from the official cult. Based on the author's travels in Russia between 1978 and 1992, this illuminating and poignant study contrasts the managed myth of WW II with the unvarnished memoirs of writers, filmmakers and ordinary citizens. (Sept.)