Russia's Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to the Soviet Heroarchy

World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War to Russians, ravaged the Soviet Union and traumatized those who survived. After the war, memory of this anguish was often publicly repressed under Stalin. But that all changed by the 1960s. Under Brezhnev, the idea of the Great Patriotic War was transformed into one of victory and celebration.

In Russia's Hero Cities, Ivo Mijnssen reveals how contradictory national recollections were revised into an idealized past that both served official need...