Jonathan Brunstedt

Jonathan Brunstedt is a historian of modern Russia, Eastern Europe, and the twentieth-century world, with a focus on the aftermath and legacy of armed conflict. His research centers on how societies remember war 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), which Foreign Affairs selected as one of its “Best Books of the Year.” Through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II, the book examines how a socialist society - ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle - reconciled itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war. The study follows decades of tensions and competition between Russian-centered and “internationalist” conceptions of victory, arguing that these reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space.  His next book project, "Every Generation Has a War of Its Own: Soviet Victory Culture and Cold War Interventionism," explores, on the one hand, how the narrative of victory in World War II fueled Soviet interventionist foreign policies during the Cold War and, on the other, how  Soviet political culture, rooted in myths and memories of military triumph, grappled with the realities of defeat and humiliation in war--most notably in Afghanistan.

A recipient of the College of Arts & Sciences inaugural Research Impact Award, Brunstedt has published widely, including an award-winning article in Nationalities Papers. He currently holds an Arts & Humanities Fellowship and in 2025 will be a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His research has been supported by the NEH, the Visegrad program at the Open Society Archives in Budapest, the Woodrow Wilson Center Kennan Institute, the Aleksanteri Institute, IREX, and the Scowcroft Institute, among other institutions. Previously, Brunstedt was an assistant professor of Modern European History at Utah State University. He completed his Ph.D. in Modern History and M.Phil., with distinction, at the University of Oxford.

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