Katerina Clark (1941–2024)

When it's all said and done this effort to analyze Soviet politics through the prism of literary/cultural theory fell flat for me. While I'm not going to say that Clark is attempting to rehabilitate Soviet culture by keeping Stalinism at arms-length (yes, I've seen that argument made), the more annoying aspect is that she abandons her metaphor of Soviet Moscow as a new Rome very quickly, making you wonder why she even bothered to invoke it. A more conventional contrast between the conflicting demands of the messianic tendencies of the Party, the requirement of Popular Front politics to make overseas connections and the eventual pressing need to bolster Russian nationalism might have served Clark better; though that probably would have rendered much of her background as a cultural analyst irrelevant.… (mehr)