Jonathan Brunstedt

Jonathan Brunstedt is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University, specializing in modern Russia, Eastern Europe, and the global legacies of war. His research focuses on how societies remember armed conflict and navigate the tensions between idealized pasts and contemporary social, political, and geopolitical realities. He is the author of The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge University Press), selected by Foreign Affairs as one of its “Best Books of the Year.” The book explores how a multiethnic socialist state reconciled internationalist ideals with a growing emphasis on Russian patriotism, homeland, and military glorification—tensions that continue to reverberate in post-Soviet politics and memory.

His current project, Every Generation Has a War of Its Own: Soviet Victory Culture and Cold War Interventionism, explores the transnational dimensions of Soviet memory culture, revealing how triumphalist narratives of the victory over fascism in 1945 shaped the Communist Party’s global ambitions and interventionist foreign policies. At the same time, it examines how this victory culture clashed with the harsh realities of defeat and humiliation in war, most powerfully in Afghanistan.

Brunstedt’s research has been supported by institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Kennan Institute, the Aleksanteri Institute, IREX, the Scowcroft Institute, among others. He is currently an Arts & Humanities Fellow at Texas A&M and was a Visegrad Scholar at the Open Society Archives in Budapest in 2024. In 2025, he served as a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The College of Arts & Sciences recognized his work with its inaugural Research Impact Award.

You can read more about Brunstedt’s ongoing research in a recent interview: Drawing Lessons from the Soviet-Afghan War: A Conversation with Title VIII Research Scholar Jonathan Brunstedt