Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

CHAPTER 2

THE SEARCH FOR THE STALIN BIOGRAPHERS’ STONE

Stalin kept no diary, wrote no memoirs and evinced little interest in his personal history, yet he went to a great deal of trouble to shape both his biography and the documentary trail that would be followed by his biographers.¹

‘It is difficult to describe the process,’ Stalin told an admiring American visitor, Jerome Davis, in 1926, when asked how he became a Bolshevik. ‘First one becomes convinced that existing conditions are wrong and unjust. Then one resolves to do the best one can to remedy them. Under the Tsar’s regime any attempt genuinely to help the people put one outside the pale of the law; one found himself hunted and hounded as a revolutionist.’²

Emil Ludwig, a German writer who had authored many biographies of famous people, asked Stalin a similar question in 1931, and received an equally terse and uninformative reply:

Ludwig: What drove you to become a rebel? Was it, perhaps, because your parents treated you badly?

Stalin: No. My parents were uneducated people, but they did not treat me badly by any means. It was different in the theological seminary of which I was then a student. In protest against the humiliating regime and the Jesuitical methods that prevailed in the seminary, I was ready to become, and eventually did become, a revolutionary, a believer in Marxism as the only genuinely revolutionary doctrine.³

In 1939 the Soviet dramatist Mikhail Bulgakov wanted to write a play about Stalin’s youth, with the intention to stage it as part of the celebrations of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. But Stalin vetoed the project, saying that ‘all young people are alike, why write a play about the young Stalin?’⁴

Stalin was occasionally more forthcoming about his early life, but not his childhood. It was the years he spent in the Bolshevik underground, a period that spanned his youth and early adulthood, that interested him. He loved to read and reflect on his writings from that time and to the end of his life remained engaged with the debates, splits, strategies, tactics and factional battles of Russia’s revolutionary socialist movement. In the 1920s he marked copiously those volumes of the first edition of Lenin’s collected works that dealt with the 1905 revolution. After the Second World War he reread with evident interest his own 1905 article on ‘The Proletarian Class and the Proletarian Party’, which had been republished in the first volume of his collected works. It was about the rules of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and Stalin took the trouble to write out at the end of his article the three conditions of party membership: agreement with its programme, material support and participation in one of its organisations. Heavily marked, too, was his copy of Georgy Safarov’s detailed 1923 study of the pre-1917 evolution of Bolshevik strategy and tactics.⁵

For Stalin, the party’s history was not even past, let alone dead. His formative, life-changing experiences as an illegal political activist in Tsarist Russia remained eternally interesting and relevant. Speaking to visiting Indian communists in 1951, he was keen to share lessons he had learned decades earlier. He urged them to eschew the tactics of the peasant-based revolution that had recently brought the Chinese communists to power and instead to emulate the worker–peasant alliance that had secured victory for the Bolsheviks. He warned of the dangers of premature uprisings, pointing out that in July 1917 the Bolsheviks had restrained an insurrectionary workers’ movement in Petrograd because it would have been defeated by counter-revolutionary forces. He argued against individual acts of terrorism, which had the effect of dividing the progressive movement into the heroes of such actions and the crowds who cheered them from the sidelines but did not themselves participate in revolutionary struggles. ‘We are against the theory of the hero and the crowd,’ he told them.⁶

Winston Churchill famously said in relation to Stalin’s foreign policy: ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ Less often quoted is what he said next: ‘But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’⁷

This was in October 1939 and Churchill was explaining to the listeners of his BBC radio broadcast why, on the eve of the Second World War, Stalin had concluded a non-aggression pact with Hitler and then joined in the German attack on Poland. Churchill’s hope was that Soviet national interest and the Nazi threat would eventually lead Stalin to break with Hitler. In the event, the relationship was broken by Hitler when he launched his invasion of the USSR in June 1941.

The enigma of Stalin’s pre-revolutionary years is that while quite a lot is known about his political views and activities, a great deal of uncertainty surrounds the details of his family life, education, personal relations and youthful character traits. Gaps in the evidence have typically been filled in by speculation, stereotyping and cherry-picking of partisan memoirs to suit the grinding of many different personal and political axes. ‘When it comes to Stalin,’ writes the foremost biographer of his early life, Ronald Suny, ‘gossip is reported as fact; legend provides meaning; and scholarship gives way to sensationalist popular literature with tangential reference to reliable sources.’⁸

STALIN’S BIOGRAPHY: THE SEARCH BEGINS

In December 1920 Stalin handwrote his answers to a biographical questionnaire, sent to him by the Swedish branch of ROSTA, the forerunner of the TASS news agency:

1. Name: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Dzhugashvili)

2. Year and Place of Birth: 1878, Gori (Tbilisi Province)

3. Origins: Georgian. Father was a worker (shoemaker), died in 1909, Mother, a seamstress, is still alive

4. Education: Excluded from the sixth (final) class of the Tbilisi Orthodox Seminary in 1899

5. How long have you been involved in the revolutionary movement? Since 1897

6. How long have you been in the RSDLP [Russian Social Democratic Labour Party] and in the Bolshevik faction? Joined the RSDLP in 1898 and the Bolshevik faction in 1903 (when it was formed), 1898 – member of the Tbilisi committee of the party, 1903 – member of the Caucasus regional committee of the party, 1912 – member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party

7. Were you ever a member of any other revolutionary party? No. Before 1898 I was an RSDLP sympathiser

8. Penalties that you suffered under Tsarism – imprisonment, exile, emigration: Arrested seven times, exiled six times (Irkutsk, Narym, Turukhansk etc.), escaped exile five times, served seven years in prison, lived illegally in Russia until 1917 (was in St Petersburg, not in emigration but did visit London, Berlin, Stockholm and Cracow on party business)

9. What official posts have you occupied in Soviet Russia? People’s Commissar of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate and People’s Commissar for Nationalities, member of the Council of Labour and Defence and of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, member of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee

10. Literary activities. Books, pamphlets, major articles. What newspapers and journals have you edited? Pamphlets: (1) About the Bolsheviks (in Georgian) 1904, (2) Anarchism or Socialism? (in Georgian) 1906, (3) Marxism and the National Question (in Russian) 1913. Edited the Georgian Bolshevik newspaper ‘New Times’ (1906), and Russian newspapers: ‘The Baku Proletarian’ (1908), ‘The Star’ in St Petersburg [at the time of the Lena massacre] (1912) and the central party organ ‘The Worker’s Way’ during the days of Kerensky in 1917

11. Personal Comments: Currently a member of the party Central Committee and its Orgburo

J. Stalin⁹

One curiosity concerns Stalin’s date of birth. According to church records he was born on 6 December 1878 (Old-Style Russian calendar) and that is the year he wrote in the ROSTA questionnaire. However, Stalin’s publicly declared birthday was 21 December 1879 (New-Style Russian calendar) and that was the date extravagantly celebrated as his fiftieth in 1929, and again in 1939 and 1949 as his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. The reason for this discrepancy remains a mystery but in October 1921 Stalin completed a party registration form in which he put down 1879 as the year of his birth.¹⁰ A December 1922 biographical summary prepared by his staff stated that was the year of his birth, as did the opening line of a short biography prepared by Ivan P. Tovstukha, documents that Stalin would certainly have read and approved.¹¹

Tovstukha’s text was published as one of a series of portraits of Bolshevik leaders in the so-called Granat biographical dictionary, prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. A trusted and valued assistant, Tovstukha was a long-time revolutionary activist who started working for the future dictator when Stalin was appointed people’s commissar for nationalities. When Stalin became party general-secretary, Tovstukha followed him into the central party apparatus. Throughout the 1920s, he was one of Stalin’s most important aides and performed a number of key functions, including a stint as director of the Lenin Institute, which was responsible for the publication of the first edition of Lenin’s collected writings. In 1931 he was appointed deputy director of the newly created Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL), the party’s archive-cum-research organisation. Tovstukha died of tuberculosis in 1935 but his memory was preserved by a plaque and by naming one of the archive’s reading rooms after him.¹²

Tovstukha’s ‘biography’ of his boss, which was little more than an extended chronology of Stalin’s political career, was composed at the height of the internal party succession struggle following Lenin’s death in 1924. It stressed Stalin’s closeness to Lenin, before, during and after the revolution. It was also published as a fourteen-page pamphlet and an expanded version was published in Pravda in 1929 as one of several laudatory pieces marking Stalin’s fiftieth birthday.¹³

Tovstukha’s account was devoid of any really personal information about Stalin, and the same was true of the other Bolshevik biographies featured in the Granat. In theory, if not in always in practice, the Bolsheviks believed in self-effacement. They lived their lives in and through the collective that was the party. Their individual biographies were part and parcel of the history of the party. Their personalities and private lives were strictly subordinate to their political stories. The absence of interiority in the manner of Bildungsroman was a matter of pride.

In June 1926 Stalin went on a month-long trip to Georgia. In Tbilisi he gave a speech to railway workers in which he summarised his pre-revolutionary political journey. As befits a former seminarian, the speech was steeped in religious imagery. It was the closest he ever came to writing an autobiography.

Stalin was replying to the workers’ greetings and he began by modestly denying he was the ‘legendary warrior-knight’ they thought him to be. The true story of his political life, said Stalin, was that he had been educated by the prolet-ariat. His first teachers were those Tbilisi workers he came into contact with when he was placed in charge of a study circle of railwaymen in 1898. From them he received lessons in practical political work. This was his ‘first baptism in the revolutionary struggle’, when he served as an ‘apprentice in the art of revolution’. His ‘second baptism in the revolutionary struggle’ were the years (1907–9) he spent in Baku organising the oil workers. It was in Baku that he ‘became a journeyman in the art of revolution’. After a period in the wilderness – ‘wandering[s] from one prison or place of exile to another’ – he was sent by the party to Petrograd where in 1917 he received his ‘third baptism in the revolutionary struggle’. It was in Russia, under Lenin’s guidance, that he became ‘a master workman in the art of revolution’.¹⁴

Striking about Stalin’s telling of this story was that he cast it entirely in class and political terms. His Georgian background was of no consequence except as an accidental matter of geography. His formative experiences of class struggle could have happened anywhere there were workers and the culminating episode took place in Petrograd – the radical heartland of the Russian proletariat. ‘You know, Papa used to be a Georgian once,’ the young Vasily Stalin told his six-year-old sister, Svetlana, who also recorded in her memoirs that when she was a child her family ‘paid no special attention to anything Georgian – my father had become completely Russian’.¹⁵

Tovstukha wanted to write a full biography of Stalin but he had rivals for that honour within the party. One of his competitors was the party official Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky (1878–1943), who fancied himself a historian. Among his later claims to fame was co-authorship with Stalin and others of the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) that served as the bible of the party’s history until Stalin’s death.

Yaroslavsky’s ambition to publish a biography of Stalin was stymied by Tovstukha and others in IMEL. When he appealed to Stalin for help in August 1935, he was given short shrift. ‘I am against the idea of a biography about me,’ wrote Stalin on Yaroslavsky’s letter. ‘Gorky had a plan like yours, and he also asked me, but I have backed away from this issue. I don’t think the time has come for a Stalin biography!’¹⁶

The problem was that the absence of a proper, official biography was a yawning gap in a vista that Stalin himself had opened up in 1931 when he published a letter on ‘Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism’ in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya.¹⁷ Stalin’s missive was a long and boring diatribe against a young historian called Anatoly Slutsky who published an article that had the cheek to criticise aspects of Lenin’s policy towards German social democracy before the First World War. Stalin denounced the article and its author as ‘anti-party’ and ‘semi-Trotskyist’. Tedious and tendentious though it was, Stalin’s denunciation of Slutsky was not a purely dogmatic assertion of the party line on Lenin: his criticisms were supported by a detailed textual and historical analysis of the issue.

As punishment for his temerity, Slutsky was expelled from the Society of Marxist Historians and lost his post at the Communist Academy’s Institute of History. He was then expelled from the communist party.¹⁸

In his ‘letter’, Stalin took the opportunity to launch a broader attack on the work of party historians, including Yaroslavsky: ‘Who, except hopeless bureaucrats, can rely on written documents alone? Who, except archive rats, does not understand that a party and its leaders must be tested primarily by their deeds . . . Lenin taught us to test revolutionary parties, trends and leaders not by their declarations and resolutions, but by their deeds.’¹⁹

In his interview with Emil Ludwig a couple of months later, Stalin reinforced the point that in the study of history, people and their actions mattered most. When the German writer commented that ‘Marxism denies that the individual plays an outstanding role in history’, Stalin responded that ‘Marxism does not at all deny the role played by outstanding individuals or that history is made by people’, though, of course, they do not make history under conditions of their own choosing: ‘And great people are worth anything at all only to the extent that they are able to correctly understand these conditions, to understand how to change them.’ When Ludwig persisted with his argument, saying that ‘Marxism denies the role of heroes, the role of heroic personalities in history’, Stalin replied that ‘Marxism has never denied the role of heroes. On the contrary, it admits that they play a considerable role.’²⁰

By suggesting that ‘heroes’ can by their actions fundamentally change the existing social order – the pre-eminent example being Lenin’s determination to stage a socialist revolution in 1917 – Stalin gave a voluntaristic spin to the deterministic Marxist orthodoxy that individuals are only important insofar as they personify the historical process and act in accordance with the laws of social development.²¹ But devotees of his personality cult yearned for an edifying account of their hero’s epic life story.

BERIA AND BARBUSSE

The vacuum created by the absence of an authorised Stalin biography was filled by two publications. Firstly, a book-length lecture by Lavrenty Beria, On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia. Secondly, and more surprisingly, a semi-official popular biography of Stalin by the French communist intellectual Henri Barbusse (1873–1935).

Prior to becoming Stalin’s security chief in 1938, Beria headed the Georgian communist party. The Tbilisi branch of IMEL was particularly dedicated to the study of Stalin’s pre-1917 political activities in Transcaucasia and Beria published a (ghost-written) article on this topic in the party’s theoretical journal Bol’shevik in 1934. In July 1935 he delivered a long lecture on the same subject to a party audience in Tbilisi. The text of his lecture was serialised in Pravda and then published as a book. Party members throughout the USSR were instructed to study it carefully. Beria sent an inscribed copy to his ‘Dear, beloved, teacher, the Great Stalin’, who read the book and marked a few of its pages, mainly underlining the dates of events that he had been involved in. As Judith Devlin writes, the book soon became a Stalin cult classic, was issued in eight separate editions and remained in print until Stalin’s death in 1953.²²

Beria’s glowing account of the young Stalin’s revolutionary activities was notable for the number of unsigned publications in Georgian that he attributed to Stalin and for his utilisation of unpublished memoirs by Stalin’s old comrades and acquaintances. The limitation of Beria’s rather turgid text was that, apart from Stalin, it was populated by personages that few people had ever heard of – or cared about – and dealt with equally obscure events.

Henri Barbusse was a famous pacifist and anti-war writer. A member of the French communist party from 1923, he helped organise the 1932 Amsterdam World Congress Against War and headed the World Committee Against War and Fascism founded in 1933. While Stalin conversed with a number of prominent western intellectuals in the 1930s, Barbusse was the only one he met in the 1920s as well. Stalin talked to Barbusse four times – in September 1927, October 1932, August 1933 and November 1934. ‘I’m not so busy that I can’t find time to talk to Comrade Barbusse,’ Stalin remarked at their 1932 meeting.²³

The idea of writing a biography of Stalin was prompted by conversations that Barbusse had with the communist propaganda impresario Willi Münzenberg, a German revolutionary who worked for the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), established by the Bolsheviks in March 1919 to spread the revolution.²⁴ In December 1932 the Soviet party’s propaganda section wrote to Stalin recommending that Barbusse’s proposal to write such a book should be accepted. Tovstukha was proposed as the overseer of the project but, in the event, that task was carried out by party propaganda chief Alexei Stetsky.²⁵

Though published in the USSR, as well as France and other countries, Barbusse’s biography was intended mainly for an international audience. It was this propagandistic purpose, together with Barbusse’s fame as a writer and his reliability as a communist, that persuaded Stalin to back the project. No doubt Stalin was impressed, too, by the fact that Barbusse had already written a biography of one of his literary heroes, Emile Zola, a Russian translation of that book having been published in early 1933.

In September 1934 Stetsky sent Barbusse a long list of corrections and queries concerning the manuscript of his biography of Stalin. Stetsky’s letter to Barbusse was in French but was translated into Russian for the benefit of Stalin and other party officials.

Stetsky’s amendments had two main strands. Firstly, there were numerous corrections of factual mistakes about Stalin’s life and the history of Bolshevism. Stalin’s father was a shoemaker who worked in a factory, not a peasant. Stalin went to church school because it was free and accessible, not because his father was particularly religious. It was not Lenin but his brother who was a Narodnik (Populist). Neither Stalin nor Lenin lived in Berlin for several months. Barbusse had got wrong the dates of Stalin’s many arrests, imprisonments, exiles and so on.

Secondly, Stetsky made a sustained effort to persuade Barbusse to endorse the Soviet party view that Trotsky and the Trotskyists were not only Stalin’s political opponents but a malign and insidious influence, a counter-revolutionary force that must be rooted out of the communist movement by any means necessary.

In his covering note to Barbusse, Stetsky also expressed concern about his depiction of Stalin as a practical, commonsensical individual rather than as the greatest Marxist theoretician since Lenin. Stetsky also felt that Barbusse’s portrayal of Stalin as a person was incomplete. The biography did not show Stalin’s ‘style of work, the way he talked or his multifaceted connections with the masses; it does not show the love that surrounds Stalin’. However, Stetsky was confident that Barbusse, with all his great talent, would be able to capture and convey Stalin in all his ‘majesty’.²⁶

The biography was published in French in 1935 (Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme – a signed copy may be found in Stalin’s library) and in Russian in 1936. In his preface to the Russian edition, Stetsky wrote that ‘the book has been written with a tremendous amount of love for the Soviet land, its peoples and its leader’. Unfortunately, by this time Barbusse was dead, having passed away during a trip to Moscow in August 1935.

His memorial meeting in Moscow was packed with Soviet intellectuals and party officials and an honour guard escorted Barbusse’s mortal remains to the railway station. An official delegation then accompanied them to Paris on the Siberian Express. Stalin himself issued a statement: ‘I share pain with you, on this occasion of the passing of our friend, the friend of the French working class, the noble son of the French people, the friend of the workers of all countries.’²⁷

Barbusse’s biography of Stalin was a hagiography but it was a clever and interesting one. Rather than a conventional biography, it was a political portrait of Stalin as the personification of the Soviet socialist project. Barbusse’s privately stated aim in writing the book was ‘to provide a complete portrait of the man on whom this social transformation pivots so that the reader may get to know him well’.²⁸ To achieve that goal he wrote a potted history of revolutionary Russia in which Stalin, together with Lenin, is the key figure, while at the same time contrasting the personalities of Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky is depicted as arrogant, self-important, fractious, impractical, flashy, obstinate and verbose, a man of despotic character, while Stalin

relies with all his weight upon reason and practical common sense. He is impeccably and inexorably methodical. He knows. He thoroughly understands Leninism. . . . He does not try to show off and is not worried by a desire to be original. He merely tries to do everything that he can do. He does not believe in eloquence or sensationalism. When he speaks he merely tries to combine simplicity with clearness.²⁹

As this quotation shows, Stetsky did not succeed in shifting Barbusse from his view that Stalin was primarily a praktik – a man of action. He was more successful in relation to Barbusse’s treatment of Trotsky, though he would probably have wished that Stalin’s rival did not loom so large in the book. Barbusse’s conclusion was the orthodox one that by the time Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov was assassinated in December 1934, Trotsky had become a counter-revolutionary. But Barbusse plotted Trotsky’s alleged path to counter-revolution carefully and plausibly. His account of the disputes with Lenin and Stalin that led Trotsky to a counter-revolutionary position was highly effective compared to the hysterical denunciations and polemics of Soviet propagandists.

Barbusse’s book, Andrew Sobanet suggests, may have provided a template for the plot of the official Soviet Short Biography of Stalin that was to be published in 1939:

The Short Biography, like Staline, recounts Stalin’s early family life and schooling, followed by a description of life in his native region and the rising importance of Marxism. Both texts elaborate on Stalin’s affection for Lenin’s work and writing, his work as a propagandist, his pre-1917 revolutionary activities, and his heroic work in the revolutionary and civil war eras. Just as in Barbusse’s text, Stalin is described in the Short Biography as ‘the worthy continuer of the cause of Lenin . . . Stalin is the Lenin of today’. References to Stalin’s alleged omnipotence and omniscience are also found in both books. . . . Both books end with pages on Stalin that praise him in absurdly grandiose terms.³⁰

The problem with Barbusse’s book was that it was hostage to the fortunes of the people who populated its pages, some of whom would soon became ‘unpersons’ in the USSR after falling victim to Stalin’s purges. Within a couple of years of its publication, the Russian edition had been withdrawn from circulation and a block put on further editions or translations.

The English edition of the book contained a photograph of Stalin and Marshal Alexander Yegorov, with whom he had served during the Russian Civil War. However, Yegorov was arrested in 1938 for participating in an anti-Soviet conspiracy, and shot in 1939. Tantalisingly, the English edition also carries a photo of some bookcases said to be ‘Stalin’s Secret Library, Now in Tiflis Museum’, a secret stash, one assumes, from his underground days.

In general, Stalin remained resistant to biographies or hagiographies of himself, because he didn’t want to give too much encouragement to his personality cult. In 1933 he opposed a proposal from the Society of Old Bolsheviks to stage an exhibition based on his biography, commenting that ‘such undertakings lead to the strengthening of the “cult of personality”, which is harmful and incompatible with the spirit of our party’. He also prohibited publication of a Ukrainian party brochure about his life to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the foundation of the Komsomol (Young Communist League). When, in 1935, a journal wanted to publish a military-related article about ‘Stalin in the Sal’sk Steppe’, he objected that his role was exaggerated and there was little about other people. Stalin was particularly averse to the publication of accounts of his childhood.³¹ Most dramatic was his intervention to stop publication in 1938 of a children’s book by V. Smirnova called Tales of Stalin’s Childhood:

The little book is filled with a mass of factual errors, distortions, exaggerations and undeserved praise. The author has been misled by fairy tale enthusiasts, liars (perhaps ‘honest’ liars) and sycophants. A pity for the author, but facts are facts. . . . Most important is that the book has a tendency to inculcate in the consciousness of Soviet children (and people in general) a cult of personalities, great leaders and infallible heroes. That is dangerous and harmful. . . . I advise you to burn the book.³²

He was similarly outraged by an article on ‘J. V. Stalin at the Head of Baku Bolsheviks and Workers, 1907–1908’. Mikhail Moskalev (1902–1965) was its author and it was published in a historical journal in January 1940 and then summarised by a feature article in Pravda. Stalin read the Pravda piece and marked it with some angry-looking red-penned underlining and question marks. He also read the original article and marked it in a similar fashion. Stalin then wrote to the editor of the journal, who, as it happens, was Yaroslavsky. The letter was marked ‘not for publication’, but Stalin forwarded copies to the Politburo and to the editor of Pravda as well as to the author. Stalin complained to Yaroslavsky that the article distorted historical truth and contained factual errors. He criticised Moskalev’s use of dubious memoir sources and concluded that ‘the history of Bolshevism must not be distorted – that’s intolerable, it contradicts the profession and dignity of Bolshevik historians’.³³

Yaroslavsky wanted to meet Stalin to discuss the matter but ended up writing him a detailed letter setting out the sources on which Moskalev’s article had been based. Stalin replied two days later, on 29 April, repeating and detailing his point that the sources were unreliable. ‘An historian has no right’, wrote Stalin, ‘to just take on trust memoirs and articles based on them. They have a duty to examine them critically and to verify them on the basis of objective information.’ The party’s history, Stalin stated, had to be a scientific history, one based on the whole truth: ‘Toadyism is incompatible with scientific history.’

One issue in dispute was Moskalev’s statement that Stalin had been the editor of the Baku oil workers’ newspaper Gudok (The Siren), which, as Yaroslavsky pointed out, was based on a number of different sources, including the recollections of the paper’s editor-publisher. The publisher was ‘confused’, Stalin wrote in reply. ‘I never visited the Gudok editorial offices. I was not a member of its editorial board. I was not the de facto editor of Gudok (I didn’t have the time). That was Comrade Dzhaparidze.’ However, Stalin did make numerous contributions to the paper in 1907–8, so a little confusion in the memories of his old comrades was not all that surprising.³⁴

STALIN’S COLLECTED WORKS

Stalin’s sixtieth birthday celebrations in December 1939 provided an opening for Yaroslavsky to revive his attempts to publish a Stalin biography. When a piece about Stalin that he wrote for a Soviet encyclopaedia was rejected by its editors as too long and dense, he appealed to Stalin to allow its publication as a short book, assuring him that it had been written in a ‘simple style accessible to the masses’. His book was published at the end of 1939 but he had been upstaged by IMEL’s publication of a Short Biography of Stalin, with a print run of more than 1.2 million copies. However, when Stalin was sent a copy of the book’s proofs, he wrote on the covering note that he had ‘no time to look at it’.³⁵ The signed copy of Yaroslavsky’s book was unmarked by Stalin, and probably unread.

A project closer to Stalin’s heart was the publication of his collected writings. Articles, leaflets, letters, speeches, statements, reports, interviews and contributions to Marxist theory – these were texts that charted his political life, marked its milestones and recorded his most important thoughts.

Publishing the collected works of Bolshevik leaders was a small industry in the prewar USSR. As early as 1923, a twenty-two-volume edition of Zinoviev’s writings was in print. In 1929 Trotsky’s collected works reached volume twenty. By the mid-1930s, there were already three editions of Lenin’s collected works. By these standards, the publication of Stalin’s works was slow off the mark.

The indefatigable Tovstukha started gathering material for Stalin’s collected works in the early 1930s, and in 1931 Stalin himself sketched a plan for an eight-volume edition. In August 1935 – a fortnight after Tovstukha’s death – the Politburo, spurred on by the unauthorised republication of his pre-revolutionary writings, passed a resolution decreeing the publication of Stalin’s collected works. The job was given to IMEL, in conjunction with Stetsky and the party’s propaganda department.³⁶

By November, Stetsky had outlined to Stalin the plans for publication. There would be eight to ten volumes called Sochineniya (Works or Writings). The edition would contain Stalin’s previously published writings plus unpublished items such as stenograms of speeches, letters, notes and telegrams. The documents would be published in chronological order and would be supported by detailed factual information on their content. The volumes would contain a chronology of Stalin’s life and political activities and would be published in all the national languages of the USSR as well as various foreign languages.³⁷

In later years, the intended number of volumes was increased to twelve and then to sixteen but the rest of the plan remained much the same and, indeed, was mostly delivered. However, it took a lot longer than expected. The intention was to publish the first volumes in 1936 and to complete the series by 1937 – in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. But the first volume did not see the light of day for another decade, for reasons that were many and varied.

The technical challenge was that Stalin’s earliest writings were in Georgian, many of them published anonymously or under pseudonyms. They had to be identified, authenticated as Stalin’s and then translated into Russian. There was a bit of a turf war between IMEL and its Tbilisi affiliate, which was controlled by the Georgian communist party. Needless to say, the Georgian comrades were keen to assert custodianship of their native son’s youthful writings. Then there was the disruptive impact of the Great Terror. In the mid-1930s many IMEL staff were arrested or dismissed from their posts as ‘enemies of the people’. The terror also cut a swathe through the ranks of party historians. Among party officials, Stetsky was a prominent victim; he was arrested and shot in 1938. During the Great Patriotic War, many IMEL staffers served in the armed forces, often as political officers in charge of propaganda, education and morale. The section responsible for Stalin’s works was reduced to three people and evacuated to Ufa. Among its additional responsibilities was the urgent preparation of special wartime collections of Stalin’s writings, with stirring titles like ‘Articles and Speeches about Ukraine’ and ‘The Military Correspondence of Lenin and Stalin’.³⁸

There is no evidence that Stalin was unduly worried about the delays. This was a project for posterity; in the meantime there were millions upon millions of copies of Stalin’s books already circulating in the USSR: The Foundations of Leninism, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, Problems of Leninism and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. During the war these Stalinist classics were joined by a collection of Stalin’s speeches, On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union.

IMEL sent Stalin regular progress reports and consulted him about matters great and small, including the technicalities of translating his Georgian writings. He was often remiss or slow to reply to queries and not until the eve of the first volume’s publication in 1946 did he become intensively involved in the process and take charge of curating his own intellectual legacy. Stalin was sent a ‘dummy’ (in Russian, maket) of each volume, from which he would make the final selection of documents to be published. He used the opportunity to correct and edit texts. Stalin’s handwritten amendments were stylistic rather than substantive. It was a case of him glossing rather than rewriting his personal history.³⁹

Besides, politically embarrassing or dubious statements had already been weeded out by the time the proofs arrived on Stalin’s desk. More often than not, weeding took the form of omission and elision rather than the direct doctoring of documents. History was not so much altered by Stalin’s underlings as distorted. The trickiest issue was how to deal with favourable mentions in his writings of people who were at the time Stalin’s comrades-in-arms but later became political opponents or, worse still, ‘enemies of the state’. Among them were the many former leaders of the party who had been accused of treason and arraigned at a series of gruesome show trials in the 1930s. Where possible, favourable references to them were excluded, and those texts that featured Stalin’s polemics against them omitted ‘comrade’ when referring to them. One egregious example of such censorship was this omission from an article by Stalin on the Bolshevik seizure of power that was originally published by Pravda in November 1918:

All the practical work of organising the insurrection was conducted under the ingenious leadership of the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It is safe to say that the rapid switching of the [Petrograd] garrison to the side of the Soviet was due to the work of the party’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, above all Comrade Trotsky.⁴⁰

A key figure in the preparation of Stalin’s works was a young historian called Vasily Mochalov, who specialised in the history of the labour movement in the Caucasus. He knew Georgian very well and was appointed head of IMEL’s Stalin section in 1940. Frustrated by the slow progress, he wrote to Stalin and the Politburo in August 1944 to urge the appointment of extra staff and the imposition of short deadlines for the publication of the first two or three volumes.⁴¹

While Stalin did not reply to Mochalov’s letter, it provoked a flurry of Politburo decisions to speed up the project, which did not please Mochalov’s superiors in IMEL.⁴² His letter cast them in a bad light and added to the pressure to produce results. Mochalov was also in conflict with the Georgian comrades about translation issues and about which unsigned publications to attribute to Stalin. According to his Tbilisi colleagues, Mochalov’s knowledge of the languages and history of the Caucasus was inadequate and had led to mistakes in the editing and translation of Stalin’s early writings.

In October 1944 Mochalov was told by IMEL’s newly appointed director, Vladimir Kruzhkov, that the Institute no longer required his services. When Mochalov asked why, he was told it was because of a personality clash between him and Kruzhkov.⁴³ In his correspondence with the Politburo, Kruzhkov blamed Mochalov, and former IMEL director M. B. Mitin, for the lack of progress in the publication of Stalin’s collected works.⁴⁴ Undaunted, Mochalov continued to participate in the Institute’s discussions about the preparation of the Sochineniya and to register his objections to IMEL’s handling of the project. He also reached out to Stalin again, asking for a meeting to discuss the publication. His efforts were rewarded by a summons to meet Stalin on 28 December 1945. Also in attendance was Kruzhkov, and Pyotr Shariya, the Georgian communist party’s propaganda chief and the former head of IMEL’s Tbilisi office.

Mochalov wrote quite a detailed report of the meeting, which took place in Stalin’s Kremlin office in the evening and lasted for ninety minutes.

Stalin began the meeting by asking about the disagreements between Kruzhkov and Mochalov. Kruzhkov claimed these had been resolved but Mochalov restated his objections to including in the first two volumes several articles whose authorship was uncertain, including two articles published in the Georgian newspaper Brdzola (Struggle), which he thought had a ‘calm tone’ compared to other articles attributed to Stalin.

When Stalin asked if his objections were the reason he had been kicked out of IMEL, Mochalov replied that it was for Kruzhkov to say, but, in his view, the director was obviously not happy about the letter he had written to the party leadership. Mochalov also mentioned his differences with Shariya, who favoured old-style translation as opposed to the ‘new translation’ that Mochalov advocated.

Stalin responded by saying that while some of the translation was poor, part of it was quite artistic and it seemed to be the work of a different translator. ‘Translation’, opined Stalin, ‘is more difficult than writing.’ He then mused on the need to amend his writings, taking as an example his articles on ‘Anarchism or Socialism?’, which he had written on the hoof in instalments for different newspapers.

About his articles in Brdzola, Stalin agreed their tones were different. The calm tone, he explained, was because he ‘aspired to be a professor and wanted to go to university. . . . The Batumi shootings changed everything for me. I started to curse. . . . The tone changed.’⁴⁵

Discussing the size of the print run, Stalin modestly suggested that 30,000–40,000 copies would be enough. When someone pointed out the print run for Lenin’s collected works was half a million, Stalin said that he was no Lenin, but was eventually persuaded to accept a figure of 300,000. Stalin wanted each volume to be no more than 300–360 pages long. He preferred the small-scale format of Lenin’s works but was indifferent as to whether the cover should be grey or claret (the colour actually chosen).⁴⁶

According to Mochalov’s wife, Raisa Konushaya (who also worked at IMEL), he returned home from the meeting ‘ashen-faced but bright-eyed’. He told her that Stalin had supported his position and publications that were not his would be excluded from the first two volumes of the works.⁴⁷ However, Shariya’s recollection was that Stalin let Mochalov have his say and then proceeded to claim the authorship of the disputed unsigned publications.⁴⁸

Not long after the meeting in Stalin’s office, the Politburo passed another resolution on the publication of his works. There would be sixteen volumes, each with a print run of 500,000, priced at six roubles a book. The first three volumes would be published in 1946, volumes four to ten in 1947 and the rest in 1948. Resolutions were also passed on the speedy translation of the series into various languages, with print runs in the tens and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands.⁴⁹ The edition was announced publicly in Pravda on 20 January 1946 and the first volume went on sale in July.

Stalin contributed a preface to the first volume in which he urged his readers to regard his early writings as the work ‘of a young Marxist not yet moulded into a finished Marxist-Leninist’. He highlighted two youthful errors. He admitted to having been wrong to advocate the distribution of landlords’ lands to the peasants as private property rather than taking them into state ownership, as Lenin favoured. This first mistake he linked to his failure to appreciate fully Lenin’s view that the popular overthrow of Tsarist autocracy would be rapidly followed by a socialist revolution in Russia. Stalin also admitted he had been wrong to go along with the then prevailing view among Marxists that socialist revolutions required the majority of the population in any given state to be working class, whereas Lenin had shown that the victory of socialism was possible even in a predominantly peasant country like Russia.⁵⁰

Thirteen volumes of the Works covering the period 1901–34 were published between 1946 and 1949. Publication then stalled and the project was cancelled after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th party congress.

It is hard to understand why the final three volumes were not published while Stalin was alive. ‘Dummies’ of all the volumes were available to him from 1946 onwards. One possibility is that Stalin couldn’t make up his mind about whether to update the 1938 Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was slated for publication as volume fifteen of his works (its authorship now having been attributed to him rather than an anonymous party commission). In October 1946 Kruzhkov sent him the dummy of that book, together with a note detailing what corrections had been made to the original. In January 1947 party propaganda chief Georgy Alexandrov (1908–1961) and Pyotr Fedoseev (1908–1990), editor of the party’s journal, Bol’shevik, sent him drafts of two chapters that extended the CPSU’s history to 1945, taking their cues from Stalin’s February 1946 election speech in which he had characterised the war and analysed the reasons for the Soviet victory. In August 1948 another party official submitted a draft of two additional chapters of the Short Course, seemingly at Stalin’s own request. In 1951 yet another dummy of volume fifteen, containing just the corrected 1938 text, was sent to Stalin but it, too, was never published.⁵¹

Volume fourteen, covering the period 1934–40, was also problematic, not least because of Stalin’s effusive reply to sixtieth birthday greetings from Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop: ‘The friendship between the peoples of Germany and of the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every basis for being lasting and firm.’ Such embarrassments could be glossed over but publication of the volume would inevitably draw attention to the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939–41.⁵²

Far better for Stalin’s public image was the proposed publication of an edition of his wartime correspondence with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. His long-time deputy, Vyacheslav Molotov, was put in charge of this important project in the late 1940s and two volumes of correspondence were ready for printing by 1952. There was no tampering with these documents, since copies of his private messages to Churchill and Roosevelt were readily available in western archives. Again, publication was delayed for no obvious reason and the volumes did not appear until 1957. Most likely, this was because of the favourable treatment of Tito in the correspondence. Tito, the communist leader of a mass partisan movement in Yugoslavia, was then a Soviet hero and a Stalin favourite. The two men fell out after the war and Tito was excommunicated from the communist movement on grounds that he was, in fact, an imperi—alist agent bent on the restoration of capitalism in Yugoslavia. After Stalin’s death, this impediment to the publication of the correspondence was removed by Khrushchev’s disavowal of the Stalin–Tito split and the restoration of fraternal relations with socialist Yugoslavia.⁵³

As the American historian Robert H. McNeal observed, ‘Stalin’s Sochineniya falls far short of the standards one would hope for in a definitive collection of a statesman’s papers.’⁵⁴ The Works, as they are called in the English translation, claimed to contain ‘nearly all’ of Stalin’s writings, yet McNeal identified 895 separate writings that had been signed by or identified as Stalin’s for the period covered by the thirteen published volumes, only 480 of which appeared in the Sochineniya. McNeal’s figure was inflated by an excessive number of unsigned pre-1917 publications attributed to Stalin by Beria and other Soviet authors, but there is no doubt that many documents that were verifiably his were omitted from the Sochineniya. In the Russian archives there are lists of nearly a hundred such items left out of the volumes.⁵⁵ While some documents may have been omitted because they were deemed trivial or repetitive, in many cases the motivation was plainly political. The analysis of these unpublished texts awaits their historian, but it is difficult to disagree with Olga Edel’man’s comment that they do not reveal a Stalin substantially different from the one that presents himself in those that were published.⁵⁶

Their limitations notwithstanding, the thirteen published volumes of Stalin’s Sochineniya were destined to become the single most important source for his biography – ‘fundamental’ to ‘the study of the man and his age’, as McNeal put it.⁵⁷ They have been particularly important for those biographers who see Stalin as he saw himself – primarily a political activist and theorist, whose driving force was his unstinting commitment to the communist ideology that shaped his personality as well as his behaviour. But not everyone agrees that politics is the Stalin biographers’ stone.