Myth, Memory, Trauma

Polly Jones is the Schrecker-Barbour Fellow and Associate Professor of Russian at University College, University of Oxford. She lives in Oxford, UK.

“Jones’ book is an eloquent reminder of the barbarity inflicted during Stalin’s reign and the long shadow which it continues to cast upon societal memory”— Mark Vincent, European History Quarterly"What a book! Moving deftly between history and literary scholarship, Polly Jones shows how Stalin’s ghost continued to haunt Soviet society after 1953. Prodigiously researched and beautifully written, Myth, Memory, Trauma is bound to become the standard work on the Stalin cult’s long afterlife." —Jan Plamper, author of The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (YUP, 2012)"It’s often assumed that Khrushchev’s Secret Speech initiated a straightforward, natural process of de-Stalinization in the USSR. Polly Jones challenges this commonplace in an interdisciplinary tour de force that rewrites much of the political, cultural and literary history of the period." - David Brandenberger, author of Propaganda State in Crisis (YUP 2011)"Jones’ excellent, nuanced, and empirically-rich book requires us to re-think, in important and surprising ways, our understandings of de-Stalinization, of the nature of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, of the relationship between “official” and “popular” memory, and of Soviet exceptionalism." - Anne Gorsuch, author of All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad (Oxford 2012)