Review

General Books

Jeffrey Brook's well-crafted study of Soviet public culture is essential reading for historians of Modern Europe, and it is also valuable for instruction. The book is a natural extension of Brook's previous work on popular culture, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. As he points our in the prologue of Thank You, Comrade Stalin!, by 1917 Russia was developing a pluralistic public culture, reflecting the existence of multiple perspectives, agents, and audiences. Detective, romance, and action were popular print genres, as were self-help and stories of social mobility. The cinema was also popular, and Russia's nascent film industry was thriving. In addition to commercial popular culture, Russia was an important contributor to aesthetic modernism.	1
Brooks argues that the Bolsheviks reversed these developments. They suppressed commercial popular culture and imposed a new public culture based on the moral economy of the gift and ritual political theater. The anonymous authors of Pravda effaced individual journalists; rather than contributing to society as independent agents, citizens were understood to bear a debt to the State and its leaders. To prosper under the new public culture individuals had to join the performance culture, and to do this they had to accept the incentives of the moral economy. Economic relations were reconstructed as moral obligations. After the first decade of Bolshevik rule, Stalin emerged as the leader of the Soviet Union, and Brooks argues that the charismatic aura of Stalin's persona became central to Soviet public culture. Gifts were, according to the author, the primary means by which ordinary citizens could validate their relations with Stalin. He awarded prizes for productivity; workers offered increased productivity as repayment for Stalin's beneficence.	2
Brooks shows how social groups responded to the new constraints and rule of Soviet public culture. A pivotal moment was the 1934 First Congress of Soviet Writers. Maxim Gorky and Andrei Zhdanov issued public condemnations of modernist literature. Conference participants confirmed the dominance of social realism in the arts. As Brooks explains, the value of writers, the individual author, was no longer measured by their role as individual creator. Instead, the extent to which they participated in the performance became the measure of their saliency. The Second World War was another key period. The destruction, chaos, and near defeat of the Soviet Union during the War momentarily fragmented the constraints of Soviet public culture. Stalin's persona receded during the early years of the war as a host of heroes, factory workers, tank drivers, correspondents, snipers, pilots, and generals, emerged to represent and narrate the nation's victories and struggles. Brooks concludes that this interlude was short-lived. Even before the war was over the cult of Stalin reemerged as the persona of the ageing leader presented another "gift" to a grateful population: victory. The consequences of Soviet public culture for civil society in contemporary Russia are of central concern to Brooks. He suggests that the suppression of public discussion and debate about social issues under the Soviet system allowed chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia to subsist. Such beliefs, Brooks argues, would have been weakened in the give and take of the public sphere.	3
This book is useful for undergraduate teaching, but it is most appropriate for graduate students. I would recommend the seventh chapter of the book, "Many Wars, One Victory," as a library reserve reading for any upper-division course on the Second World War. Instructors may also find the book useful for advanced undergraduate courses or independent study projects in media studies and journalism. Undergraduates are sure, however, to encounter difficulties. Brooks is an excellent writer, but the following sentence illustrates the nature of his theoretical reflections: "The layered quality of the performative culture made it possible for the press to represent the leader simultaneously as the coryphaeus of science and a scared potentate in the Byzantine or Oriental tradition" (xviii). The intellectual depth of the book, its chronology, and its conceptual frame make it an almost mandatory selection for graduate field seminars in modern European history. Brooks' use of moral economy and the Weberian concept of charisma are instructive examples of a historian's use of theory. Finally, Brooks has produced an excellent book without, it should be pointed out, making use of foreign archives. Although graduate students studying European history in the United States may take solace in this face they will want to carefully consider his claim that the official press (circulation numbers never reflect actual readership) structured debate and indicates the cultural context. Brooks is successful in this argument, and the book is an important contribution to the field.	4
Colby-Sawyer College, SUNY Stony Brook Brian A. McKenzie

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