Stalin’s Comeback? Monuments and Memory in Russia of the 2020s

Lecture by Polly Jones, Professor at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford.

The key question that Professor Polly Jones is interested in is how citizens of authoritarian regimes, especially writers and other cultural practitioners, find ways to express themselves, navigating or evading censorship and other political controls in the process.

Much of her research to date, including her two monographs, has concerned the ways that memories of Soviet and Russian experiences were articulated in published and unpublished (samizdat, tamizdat) narratives in the Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras. She is also interested in the literature and culture of the Putin era, especially its intersections with contemporary memory politics of the Stalinist and Soviet past.

She will present her forthcoming book on Gulag literature from the 20th to the 21st century, talk about monuments and memory politics in present-day Russia and also mention her project on contemporary political prisoner narratives in Russian and Ukrainian literature and other media. 

Polly Jones is author of:

• Myth, Memory, Trauma. Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
• Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)