David Brandenberger

From many people's point of view, the most surprising fact about "Political Humor Under Stalin" is, perhaps, that it existed at all. The Soviets, even during the darkest days of the Great Terror, made the same kind of wisecracks about their government that people do in any country. And many of the jokes are amusing even to these 21st-century American eyes. The author does a good job explaining the references so you can understand the jokes. They are organized by time period, which information about the context of that time in Stalinist history.

(For comparison, see Rudolf Herzog's Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany. I would totally love to read Political Humor in North Korea, if there ever is such a thing.)… (more)

This study is very much in the growing literature on how nationality is a construct of mass culture, as Brandenberger examines the steps that were taken by the Soviet leadership of the 1930s to create a usable past that might confer legitimacy on the Soviet experiment, when socialist internationalism failed to generate the requisite patriotic fervor. The irony is that while the invocation of traditional Russian heroes was merely meant to generate a halo effect for the new regime, what Stalin and his minions actually did is to create for the first time a pan-Russian sense of historical consciousness; one that is still the foundation for contemporary Russian patriotism. This is particularly since the Great Purges short-circuited efforts to create modern Soviet heroes. Apart from that, students of contemporary issues in education will gain rueful enjoyment from reading of the travails of teaching history in the Soviet educational system of the mid-twentieth century.… (more)