Stalin's Usable Past A Critical Edition of the 1937 Short History of the USSR

"The fact that Stalin temporarily set aside execution lists to edit a textbook illustrates the importance he attached to the writing of history. Thanks to this critical edition, expertly compiled by David Brandenberger, we can now see Stalin's personal interventions in what would become the country's official history textbook until his death."
-David L. Hoffmann, author of The Stalinist Era "In the Stalinist USSR of the 1930s, the dictator decided that the country needed a new, multinational, Marxist history to inspire the people and legitimize his regime. David Brandenberger's magisterial work demonstrates how writing about the past became a battlefield between official versions of the national myth."
-Ronald Grigor Suny, author of Stalin: Passage to Revolution