The Fire Burns On? The “Fiery Revolutionaries” Biographical Series and the Rethinking of Propaganda in the Brezhnev Era

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the production of late Soviet propaganda, highlighting the shifts toward greater literary sophistication and the reinvention of revolutionary biography, instituted in order to re-enthuse the population about revolutionary ideals. In the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras, the State Political Publishing House (Politizdat) grappled with a profound crisis of political persuasion and came to realize that collaboration and compromise with literary writers constituted the only solution. The key outcome of this debate over mass political literature was the innovative and unpredictable “;Fiery Revolutionaries” series of biographies, published from 1968 to the end of the Soviet Union. Arguing against the view of the Brezhnev era as a time of political language's standardization, and complicating the binary opposition between Soviet and dissident writers, I argue that it was the sophisticated and nuanced debates and editorial practices within this “;niche” in the post- Stalinist propaganda state that ultimately enabled many of the period’s most talented (and sometimes notorious) writers to contribute sophisticated biographies to the series later in its history.