21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Turgid writing style mars what should have been great book, July 4, 2000
Although this book provides a valuable insight into the dark heart of Stalinism it is marred by an exceedingly odd mixture of writing styles. In part it feels like a turgid academic thesis packed with sentences so convoluted that they don't make sense however many times you read them. But elsewhere Brooks shakes off the leaden prose and delivers just what I expected from the blurb -- an incise study of how Stalinism developed through the eyes of the media. There is a great deal of interesting material here and Brooks has obviously done a huge amount of research. He shows how Stalin gradually throttled the life out of the media and turned newspapers and magazines into codebooks for the Soviet elite, packed with dead language and curious ideas which were of crucial importance to those jostling madly for influence and of no interest or value to the general population. But every time I felt like giving the book the five stars it should have merited, I came across a passage like the following: "In a play, actors and audience briefly leave the quotidian world to enter a special arena of time and space. To describe this realm of the 'betwixt and between' in which wishes or dreams hold sway, one can employ the concept of 'liminal', that is, a threshold between sacred and profane, a transitional zone that participants in a ritual must enter in order to leave the everyday world. Arnold van Gennep, who introduced the notion in his classic 1908 study, The Rites of Passage, postulated three phrases of ritual drama..." I shall spare you the no less impenetrable thoughts of van Gennep. Brooks also has a weakness for the word 'Manicheanism' which appears far too often in this text. I write these words of criticism with a heavy heart, because inside the verbiage there is a very good book waiting to break out. Brooks has done enough to ensure that every half-serious student of Stalinism will have to buy this book, but I only wish he had found an editor able to strip away the excess words.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Soviet culture and Pravda, December 3, 2005
This review is from: Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Paperback)
Though by reading his title one may think that this book is a history of public culture in all its manifestations, Brooks' monograph focuses on the press. While taking into account many of the newspapers available in the Soviet Union, his focus is on Pravda, since `it was the center of the informational system.' (xix) Not having a sound methodology of choosing which articles to include in his survey, he instead chooses a random sample based on three criteria; one, every tenth editorial in Pravda from 1917 to Stalin's death, two, articles published on important holidays, three, reports on domestic affairs in a random sample of Pravda issues. With these articles as his guide, he seeks to investigate public culture.
Brooks calls Soviet public culture, as he defines it, as a performance. `Political activity has always been akin to drama', he writes, and `Stalin and others employed rituals of theater to draw citizens into public displays of support.' (xvi) While the image newspapers sought to create of the regime more often than naught conflicted with reality, `Soviet people could not take the public culture as a fairy tale because it infiltrated every aspect of their lives.' (xvii)
On November 9, 1917, the day after they seized power, the Bolsheviks nationalized the publishing industry. Initially, the Bolsheviks sought to use the press to persuade the population to their revolutionary cause; however, the language of the new authorities was often not understood by the masses. Further consolidation of the press into a state monopoly increased this inability to communicate. This brought upon a `shift from persuasion to compulsion in the late 1920's.' (18)
A new political class and a new social structure arose during the first decade of Soviet rule for whom `socialist building' had great appeal. The expansion of the state meant upward mobility and jobs in the public sector. Stories in the press of mobility and service legitimated the new hierarchy. In the 30s, `Stalin became the living protagonist of an almost sacred cult.' (60) And it was to him, and to a lesser extent the party, that all Soviet citizens owed a great debt to for the reported great gains of the turbulent period.
Until the completion of the first five-year plan in 1932, the press had emphasized self-sacrifice. This changed after 1932, when the plan was hailed as a success. `The ethos of self-denial for a cause ... gave way to perpetual indebtedness.' (83) Following this `great break' (author's words), the so-called `economy of the gift' became prevalent. There developed a society in which public allocation of resources `were officially presented as moral transactions, and performers who publicly thanked Stalin validated personal ties to the leader.' (84) Even having a normal job was seen as a gift, thus indebting the entire nation to the regime. Hence comes the quote which graces the title, `Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for a Happy Childhood'.
With the advent of World War Two, the press abandoned its effort to center all Soviet identity on Stalin. `Within months of the invasion', Brooks write, `the war spawned a plurality of intertwined narratives and a range of perspectives.' (160) As the war turned for the worse, the cult of Stalin waned. It was during the war when journalists were allowed a `breath of fresh air', and some journalists `tentatively displayed aspects of a civil society.' (175) This is a very strong statement, one that Brooks really doesn't seem to follow up on, or perhaps address effectively. Nevertheless, once `the tide of battle turned from defeat to victory, Stalin reasserted his public persona, and another narrative of the war arose.' (185) Stalin resumed his place at the top of the hierarchy, `the font of recognition and honor.' (186) Following the war, the population's presumed indebtedness to Stalin increased. Victory in the war became attributed to Stalin, and Stalin alone.
To sum up, I'm going to cop out and just toss in this paragraph from the epilogue:
Through his charisma, Stalin established the `otherness of the Soviet experience, its exceptionalism and independence from strictures that governed other societies. By accepting him as leader and prophet, participants in the performative culture were able to enhance their own power, justify the rightness of their cause, and deny the applicability of all other standards of behavior and morality ... The gratitude they expressed in what I have called the moral economy of the gift can be understood as a personal expression of gratefulness to Stalin and of the bond between them. The officials, activists, and enthusiasts who enjoyed this bond with Stalin were the government's link to the general populace ... This is why the pedagogical function of the performance was so important. Participants who comprised the "link" rehearsed the routines of the social order and so communicated their understanding of "the facts of life" to others.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Totally useless, January 12, 2010
This review is from: Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Paperback)
I had to buy this book for a class in russian History, and after several attempts at reading it, I along with the rest of my class quickly deduced that this book is utter crap! Brooks apparently had no clear train of thought when writting it and seemed to be overjoyed at times when he went about including such details as to how much of a percentage of a single page of the Pravda newspaper was devoted to hatever article he happened to be blathering on about.
Brooks also seemed to enjoy writting in what I call "unecessary verbosity". He went on and on at times in vernacular that I don't think several college professors would understand. That is all good and well if you might be trying to impress your peers, but not so good for the layman or undergraduate college student.
The publisher also apparently had very low quality coontrol standards as half of my class had pages missing, or totally misplaced throughout the book. My particular issue had pages 150-154 which were actually important pages of topic material for a test moved to the very last pages in the book somehow.
Overall, if I was the kind of person who burned books like a Nazi, I might have used this book for fire starting material during the recent cold snap. As it is, I got rid of it as soon aspossible as if it were a plague.
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