Please join the Harriman Institute for a Russian history workshop (kruzhok) with David Brandenberger.

The Leningrad Affair, one of the last and least-well understood of Stalin’s political purges, had a transformative effect on the postwar history of the USSR. Not only did it claim the lives of two leaders who Joseph Stalin had tapped to succeed him (Aleksei Kuznetsov and Nikolai Voznesenskii), but it compromised other prominent members of the party elite (Viacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoian and Aleksei Kosygin). It gutted the country’s third largest party organization, stymied discussions of reform and exacerbated the country’s hyper-centralization. Ultimately, the purge left Georgii Malenkov, Lavrentii Beriia and Nikita Khrushchev to assume power after Stalin’s death in 1953—a motley group of party bosses whose inconsistent leadership rocked Soviet society, confused its communist allies and roiled its Cold War rivals into the mid-1960s.

Such fallout has long justified a thorough investigation of this purge. That said, despite the importance of the Leningrad Affair to understanding the dynamics of postwar Soviet politics, remarkably little is known about the purge itself. This is largely due to the inaccessibility of key archival documents—circumstances that have hamstrung all attempts to thoroughly investigate the origins of the Leningrad Affair as well as its destructive course and impact. This book combines recently declassified material with accessible but overlooked archival files in order to tell a vivid story of vicious party infighting, bloody political violence and personal tragedy within the communist elite during the last years of Stalin’s life.

David Brandenberger teaches courses on eastern Europe and Eurasia, nationalism, socialism, propaganda and historiography at the University of Richmond. He’s published on Stalin-era propaganda, ideology and nationality policy in journals like Russian Review, Slavic Review, and Kritika and has written or edited nearly a dozen books including “National Bolshevism” (Harvard, 2002), “Propaganda State in Crisis” (Yale, 2011), “Stalin’s Master Narrative” (Yale 2019) and “Stalin’s Usable Past” (Stanford, 2024). Brandenberger is presently finishing a monograph the purge of Stalin’s would-be successors, the 1949 Leningrad Affair.