Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70

What a book! Moving deftly between history and literary scholarship, Polly Jones shows how Stalin's ghost continued to haunt Soviet society after 1953. Prodigiously researched and beautifully written, Myth, Memory, Trauma is bound to become the standard work on the Stalin cult's long afterlife. --Jan Plamper, author of The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (YUP, 2012)--Jan Plamper
It's often assumed that Khrushchev's Secret Speech initiated a straightforward, natural process of de-Stalinization in the USSR. Polly Jones challenges this commonplace in an interdisciplinary tour de force that rewrites much of the political, cultural and literary history of the period. - David Brandenberger, author of Propaganda State in Crisis (YUP 2011)
--David Brandenberger

Jones' excellent, nuanced, and empirically-rich book requires us to re-think, in important and surprising ways, our understandings of de-Stalinization, of the nature of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, of the relationship between "official" and "popular" memory, and of Soviet exceptionalism. - Anne Gorsuch, author of All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad (Oxford 2012)--Anne Gorsuch
"At every step, Jones presents a nuanced, complex and detailed examination of the attempt to come to terms with Stalin's memory and legacy over two decades. . .Jones has mined a wealth of archival sources to construct her careful, judicious analysis. . .This lucid, elegantly written work is an important contribution to the question of the way nations deal with their difficult and traumatic histories."--Lara Cook, Times Higher Education Supplement--Lara Cook "THES" (1/16/2014 12:00:00 AM)
'Polly Jones's authoritative and densely detailed new study focuses on the period from 1956 until about 1965, when an intense, fluctuating discussion of Stalinism took place.'--Wendy Slater, TLS--Wendy Slater "TLS" (6/27/2014 12:00:00 AM)
"[Myth, Memory, Trauma] offers an admirably comprehensive and nuanced picture of the zigzags of Soviet leaders and writers as they sought to construct a usable past in the decade and a half after 1956."--Phillip Boobbyer, University of Kent
--Phillip Boobbyer "Chicago Journals" (6/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
'Polly Jones' brilliantly researched study of de-Stalinisation in the Krushchev and Brezhnev eras. . . provides one of the most sophisticated and nuanced analyses of the complexities of de-Stalinisation currently available.'--History Today-- "History Today" (12/1/2014 12:00:00 AM)