Evgeny Dobrenko's long anticipated five hundred-page book, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics is undoubtedly his opus magnum. It comes from an exceptional cultural historian and linguist, endowed with rare analytical ability. The book deals with a period of apparent insipid character, compared to the revolutionary era of the 1920s and the counter revolutionary terror of the 1930s. The period is generally perceived by historians as a time of unprecedented political and social stability, the first such time in twentieth-century Russian history.

Yet, under the surface of that “stability,” the book introduces us to an unknown Iosif Stalin and to a new form of Stalinism that was all but stable and free of terror.

A virtually uncharted historic terrain, “the postwar era, says Dobrenko in the Introduction, “differed markedly from the preceding one” (5), as it actually appears to be no less than the quintessence and apex of Stalinism. This is the time when, thanks to the glory he acquired as the WWII ultimate hero of the “patriotic war,” Stalin is finally able to dispose of Lenin, under whose distorted shadow he had tried to legitimize his totalitarian power in the 1930s.

To explain Stalin's substitutive persona, Dobrenko employs vigorous linguistic tools of textual analysis claiming that “synecdoche came to replace allegory, and metonymy took the place of metaphor” (26). In other words, if Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible was an allegory of Stalin, the films after 1946 describe Stalin instead as a “metonymic figure.”

The very concept of “Socialist Realism,” coined at the First Congress of Soviet writers in the summer of 1934, but fully theorized in other disciplines only after the war, acquires unexpected dimensions under the tyrannical hand of Andrei Zhdanov, who gave his name to the dreaded anti-intellectual doctrine known as “Zhdanovism.”

While in the 1930s, Stalin the “restorer” (as Dobrenko calls him aptly) was eviscerating his own ranks of revolutionaries, in the post-1945 period he systematically and chaotically dismembered the intelligentsia with his ever-changing arbitrary demands and pervasive infantilization of people, in a society where Stalin was the only adult.

In the Forth Chapter: “Meta-Stalinism”—one of the most revealing of the nine riveting chapters—new aspects of Stalinist terror emerge under harrowing uncertainty in which intellectuals are forced to operate, in the domain of literature, philosophy, cinema, and even music. The terror consisted of never knowing, from one day to another, if under Stalin's heightened, unruly paranoia, what was white yesterday would become black tomorrow, leading to incessant changes of ideological postulates. In other words, the issue was not only about “a wrongly taken step, but because of uncertainty whether any step, in any particular direction could later be qualified as correct or mistaken” (213). Throughout the period, the obligated vehicle of the new terror was the degree of adherence to “party mindedness” (Partiinost΄), which was not, Dobrenko tells us, a matter of content but rather a modus operandi. “The communicative strategy of Stalinism” was thus “based on the textualization of power, where power is a sacred text and the only source of text is Stalin,” the result being “a culture of textual anxiety” (223).

The best illustration of such a trend is the debunking of the once all-powerful bureaucrat and official historian of philosophy Georgii Aleksandrov and his recent book History of Western European Philosophy during the epic 1947 “Debate on the Philosophical Front,” based on an earlier Central Committee resolution “On Shortcomings in Scholarly Work in the Area of Philosophy” (98). The entire upper echelons of the party nomenklatura—totaling 424 attendees, which included no less than 161 philosophers just from Moscow, and forty-eight scholars from other fields, coming from around the country, was summoned to pillory the philosopher over several grueling days in an act recalling a perverted Chorus of an ancient drama. In essence, the problem was that Aleksandrov's book was published at the same time as Stalin's on the same topic, albeit the latter more of a pamphlet than a book. There could be no alternative philosophical interpretations to Stalin's own.

The consequence of this meta-Stalinism applied to philosophy was, as Dobrenko explains, “…a retreat from the themes of the history of philosophy…” and “… a retreat from the methods of philosophy,” as “history is completely replaced by criticism” (209). Worse, this was criticism of texts that students of philosophy had no access to.

In the Fifth Chapter, “Realästhetik,” a tragic case among many is that of the legendary Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was not only forced to mercilessly disfigure a film, but also to thank the censor, in a speech delivered to the Central Committee, for helping him see the light.

Under the circumstances, it is fascinating to discover that equally harassed Dmitrii Shostakovich manages, in an almost “Soldier Švejk” fashion, to mock his three censors, Stalin, Zhdanov and Dmitrii Shepilov, by composing an operetta with the libretto consisting of Zhdanov's normative literary instructions—a device that, apparently, only the three did not get. Ominously, the last sentence of the book reads: “Putin's Russia returned (with some modifications, of course) in a natural fashion to late—but still not bygone—Stalinism” (509). Finally, the volume's English translation by Jess M. Savage—a veritable tour de force—must also be noted in deserved superlatives.