Jonathan Brunstedt

Jonathan Brunstedt is associate professor of history at Texas A&M University, specializing in modern Russia and Eastern Europe, with a focus on the aftermath and legacy of armed conflict. His research centers on how societies remember war and navigate the tensions between idealized pasts and contemporary social, political, and geopolitical realities. He is the author of The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge University Press), named one of Foreign Affairs’ “Best Books of the Year.”

Jonathan’s current project, Every Generation Has a War of Its Own: Soviet Victory Culture and Cold War Interventionism, explores the transnational dimensions of Soviet memory culture, revealing how triumphalist narratives of the victory over fascism in 1945 shaped the Communist Party’s global ambitions and interventionist foreign policies. At the same time, it examines how this victory culture clashed with the harsh realities of defeat and humiliation in war, most powerfully in Afghanistan. At CREEES, Jonathan will complete an article manuscript based on this project while finalizing archival research for the book at the Hoover Institution.