Thank You, Comrade Stalin! : Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War

Rating:
Summary: Turgid writing style mars what should have been great book
Review: 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.