"A Glorious War?": Contemporary Russia Reimagines World War I

Presenter Information

Karen Petrone, University of Kentucky

Streaming Media

Start Date

18-2-2016 7:00 PM

Description

After more than seventy years of the Soviet Union rejecting the First World War as an "imperialist war," it fell to the Soviet Union's successor state of Russia to commemorate the War's centenary in 2014. Exploring the creation of Russia's first national memorial to the First World War in Moscow and the founding of a World War I History Museum in Tsarskoe Selo, Karen Petrone argues that Russia's new remembrance of the First World War is an integral part of Vladimir Putin's campaign to re-nationalize, re-militarize, and re-masculinize contemporary Russia. To some degree, the ordeal of the Russian Empire during the First World War is being rewritten as a glorious chapter in Russian national history.

Notes

Karen Petrone is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. Her primary research interests are cultural history, gender history, propaganda, representations of war, and the history of subjectivity and everyday life, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of The Great War in Russian Memory which challenges the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union; and Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin, as well as the co-editor of The New Muscovite Cultural History, Gender Politics in Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives and Everyday Life in Russia. She is currently co-authoring a textbook for Oxford University Press entitled The Soviet Union and Russia, 1939-2015: A History in Documents.