1945–
The preeminent chronicler of Soviet memory politics who traced the Lenin cult and the Great Patriotic War myth
"People need to value what they have, and what Russians have always had is loss."
Born in 1945 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Nina Tumarkin is an American historian of Russia who has taught Soviet history and memory politics at Wellesley College since 1975. Her first book, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (1983), won the Wilson Prize, and her definitive study The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (1994) demonstrated how Stalin suppressed war memory, Brezhnev elevated it into a cult, and the cult was contested after 1985. One of six Soviet experts who briefed President Reagan before the 1985 Geneva Summit, she later learned that President Clinton read her book before his 1995 Moscow Victory Day visit and called it 'a great book.'
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1975–Professor of History, Wellesley College
- 1983Published Lenin Lives!, awarded the Wilson Prize
- 1985Soviet advisor to President Reagan, briefed for the Geneva Summit
- 1994Published The Living and the Dead
- 2000s–Director, Russian Area Studies Program, Wellesley College
- 1970s–Center Associate, Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Related historical events
Post-Soviet Memory Politics and the 'Usable Past'
After her two books, Tumarkin shifted the axis of her research to how the Soviet past is remembered and repurposed in post-Soviet Russia. Her ongoing book project has been described as Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia and, elsewhere, as Russia Remembers the War. It examines the many ways Russian political actors, from liberal oppositionists to ultra-nationalists, have remembered, celebrated, commemorated, condemned, condoned, forgotten, ignored and grappled with the Soviet experience of World War II and its aftermath. In particular it analyzes the historical politics by which the state fashions a 'usable past' to support regnant political and social structures and norms. The project focuses on how the memory of the Soviet wartime experience resonates across strata of Russian society, including the tens of thousands of volunteers who still search for the more than one million missing in action. At the same time it treats as part of its subject how the Kremlin deploys that war memory to justify its war in Ukraine. The work extends the concerns of her earlier books while distinguishing itself by setting state memory politics against both the plural ways Russian society engages the past and the war's external mobilization. Teaching Russian and twentieth-century European history at Wellesley, she has framed her courses in the context of the politics of history, so that when her classes study Peter the Great or Lenin they also consider how Stalin and Putin envisioned and used particular representations of those leaders. A comparative seminar on World War II as memory and myth spans the war narratives of several belligerent countries, among them France, Germany, Japan, the United States, Poland and Russia.