Nina Tumarkin

Nina Tumarkin is Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies, Professor of History and Director of the Russian Area Studies Program at Wellesley College, and Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her current book project on the politics of the past in Putin’s Russia builds on her previous books, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (Basic Books) and Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Harvard University Press). Her past career has also included the role of advisor to President Ronald Reagan, for whom she wrote two invited papers and served as one of six Soviet experts who briefed the President, Vice-President, and key cabinet members on the eve of Mr. Reagan’s historic first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985 at the Geneva Summit. In 1995 President Bill Clinton read Professor Tumarkin’s book, The Living and the Dead, in preparation for his Victory Day visit to Moscow.

My current research project explores the legacy of the Soviet past in Putin’s Russia. I focus on the elusive and checkered fate of Lenin, and the far more consequential and robust legacy of Stalin, whose popularity and reputation have consistently risen in the past dozen years. And I am investigating the official use and misuse of the history of the Great Patriotic War, partly, but not wholly, in the framework of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In the absence of an ideology that had purported to legitimize Soviet policy, history has come to replace ideology as the Russian regime’s prime source of legitimacy. President Vladimir Putin, in particular, has appealed to Russia’s history—or rather, to a pastiche of idealized historical narratives, some of which go back more than a thousand years—to justify many of his actions and policies. Putin’s appeal to history forms only a part of my project’s purview, which also explores the actions and views of people from many social sectors, plus significant historical memory products; these include battle reenactors, searchers for remains of the war dead, monuments and museums, debates over the fate of Lenin’s body, Lenin and Stalin memes, and public commemorations of historical events. I will contextualize my material in a framework of recent, current, and Cold War era propaganda and media.