LUREE-ians on campus, do you know about this lecture TOMORROW - TopicsExpress

LUREE-ians on campus, do you know about this lecture TOMORROW (Tuesday, Oct. 28th) from 7:30-9:30pm in the Wriston Auditorium? Joseph Stalin and the Accidental Creation of Modern Russian National Identity In his presentation, Prof. David Brandenberger argues that the formation of modern Russian national identity was a surprisingly recent event that first began to take shape under Joseph Stalin. Challenging the notion that “Russianness” is an age-old, primordial characteristic of those people living in Russia today, he observes that national identity in the modern world only becomes possible after the establishment of necessary social institutions, among them universal literacy, public schooling, mass culture and a modern army. Inasmuch as these institutions came into being in Russia only during the Soviet period (1917-1991), his talk focuses on how modern Russian national identity took shape in the context of the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. Most controversial is his description of this development as not only historically contingent, but accidental. Stalin, he argues, was a devout Marxist internationalist rather than a Russian nationalist and never intended for Soviet propaganda to precipitate the formation of a free-standing sense of national identity among Russians. Sponsor: Government Dept. Povolny Lecture Series in International Studies