Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

CHAPTER 5

BAH HUMBUG! STALIN’S POMETKI

Stalin read books in diverse ways – selectively or comprehensively, cursorily or with avid attention. Some he read cover to cover, others he merely skimmed. Sometimes he would begin reading a book, lose interest after a few pages and jump from the introduction to the conclusion. Some books he read in a single sitting, others he dipped in and out of.

Most of the books in what remains of his collection are unmarked by him except for an autograph or the imprint of his library stamp, so it is impossible to know for sure how much of it he actually read. Erik van Ree suggests that Stalin habitually marked the books he did read.¹ But even the most inveterate of annotators do not write in all their books. Only those books or parts of books whose pages remained ‘uncut’ can be safely eliminated from his reading life, assuming he didn’t read another copy of the same text.

It is rare for readers (unless they are educators) to mark fiction books, and Stalin was no exception. The texts he marked were nearly all non-fiction. Pometki, the Russian word for such markings, encompasses both the verbal and non-verbal signs that appear on the pages. The closest English word is marginalia, but Stalin’s marks are to be found between the lines and on the front, inside and back covers as well as in the margins. Marginalia also implies annotation – the use of words – but 80 per cent of Stalin’s surviving pometki consist of what H. J. Jackson has called ‘signs of attention’.²

Stalin marked the text of the pages, paragraphs and phrases that interested him by underlining them or by vertical lines in the side margin. To add emphasis, he double-lined or enclosed the passages in round brackets. To provide structure he numbered the points that interested him – numbering that could reach into the high double-digits and be spread over hundreds of pages of a single text. As an alternative or supplement to these signs of attention, Stalin wrote subheadings or rubrics in the margin. Indeed, much of his marginalia consists of repetition of words and phrases from the text itself.

His style of pometki is both normal and conventional, as anyone who marks their books will attest. As Jackson pointed out, readers marking books is a venerable tradition that stretches back to the dawn of the print era. For Erasmus, it was the essential study skill of a humanist education:

Carefully observe when reading writers whether any striking word occurs, if diction is archaic or novel, if some argument shows brilliant invention or has been skilfully adapted from elsewhere, if there is any brilliance in the style, if there is any adage, historical parallel, or maxim worth committing to memory. Such a passage should be indicated by some appropriate mark. For not only must a variety of marks be employed but appropriate ones at that, so that they will immediately indicate their purpose.³

Virginia Woolf was not alone in complaining that marking books was an abomination, an intrusion designed to impose one’s own interpretation on other readers. In his classic riposte to this accusation, Mortimer J. Adler insisted that ‘marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love’. As an active process of reading, marking means that ‘your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever’. But he was clear that the reader should only mark their own books, not those that belonged to others or were borrowed from public libraries.⁴ Stalin recognised no such distinction and freely marked any book that came into his possession, including those he borrowed from the Lenin Library and other state institutions.

As well as marking nearly 900 texts in his personal library Lenin filled notebooks with quotations, summaries and commentaries on the books he read. Stalin’s research notes were solely marked in the texts themselves. To aid retrieval of the most important or useful material, he sometimes inserted thin strips of paper between the relevant pages. Some of these now yellowing and disintegrating bookmarks can still be found in the Russian archival collection of Stalin’s library books.⁵

As Jackson also points out, the next step up from non-verbal signs is to enter into a one-way conversation with the text in the form of a brief word or phrase. When so moved, Stalin could be highly expressive.

Charles Dickens may well have been among the writers read by Stalin. Dickens was studied in Soviet schools and his writings used to teach English. The Bolsheviks didn’t like all his novels (the anti-revolutionary A Tale of Two Cities, for example) but they relished his bleak descriptions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Appealing to puritanical Bolsheviks like Stalin would have been the complete absence in Dickens of any mention of physical sexuality.⁶ As far as we know, Stalin never wrote Scrooge’s famous expletive ‘bah humbug’ in the margin of any of his books, but he used plenty of Russian equivalents. Among his choice expressions of disdain were ‘ha ha’, ‘gibberish’, ‘nonsense’, ‘rubbish’, ‘fool’, ‘scumbag’, ‘scoundrel’ and ‘piss off’.

But he could also be effusive – ‘yes-yes’, ‘agreed’, ‘good’, ‘spot on’, ‘that’s right’ – and pensive, which he sometimes signalled by writing m-da in the margin, a difficult to translate expression which indicates a combination of puzzlement and pondering what is being said. A free translation would be a polite ‘really?’ or ‘are you sure?’ Like Lenin, his most frequent annotation was NB (in Latin script) or its Russian equivalent Vn (vnimanie – attention).

Stalin’s pometki varied according to his mood and purpose. They were usually informational and highly structured and disciplined. Typically, he used coloured pencils – blue, green, red – to make his marks. Occasionally, for no discernible reason, he would mark a book with two or three colours. Sometimes he used abbreviations but mostly he wrote out words in full, though not always legibly. Stalin’s style of annotation did not change much over the years, except that as he got older he became less wordy.

While Stalin read mainly to learn something new, he also reread many of his own writings. One example is his February 1946 election speech, delivered in the theatre of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. Stalin gave the speech not long after the great Soviet victory over Nazi Germany but his theme was that, contra Catherine the Great, victors should be judged and criticised.

In a pamphlet that reproduced the text of his speech, Stalin marked the opening paragraphs in which he had said the war was not an accident or a function of personalities, it had been the inevitable result of a fundamental crisis of the capitalist system. He also marked the paragraphs in which he stated that the war had demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet social system and the viability of its multinational character. He went on to highlight the role of the communist party in securing victory and how crucial it had been to industrialise the country before the war. The final paragraph that he marked was one at the very end of the speech in which he pointed out that the communists were contesting the elections to the Supreme Soviet as part of a bloc with non-party members.⁷

Stalin did not use speechwriters. He composed his own speeches and often edited those of his colleagues. But he had a habit of recycling elements of his speeches. His reports to the 17th and 18th party congresses in 1934 and 1939 look and feel so similar because he took a copy of his 1934 speech and used it as a template for the one he delivered in 1939.⁸ It may be that he reread his 1946 election speech thinking he could use parts of it at the forthcoming party congress, preparations for which were already under way by 1947–8.

The same reason might explain why he read and marked a pamphlet containing Andrei Zhdanov’s September 1947 speech ‘On the International Situation’. Delivered at the inaugural conference of the Cominform, it was, in effect, the Soviet declaration of the cold war. The postwar world, Zhdanov told delegates from European communist parties, had split into two polarised camps – a camp of imperialism, reaction and war, and a camp of socialism, democracy and peace. Stalin knew this speech very well, since Zhdanov had extensively consulted him about its contents. Yet he made quite a few marks in the pamphlet. One theme was past and present imperialist efforts to destroy or weaken the Soviet Union. Another was the growing power and influence of the United States as a result of the war. A key marked paragraph was that, since its abandonment of President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of co-operation with the Soviet Union, the United States was heading towards a policy of military adventurism.⁹

In the event, the 19th party congress did not take place until October 1952 and Stalin chose not to deliver the main report. Instead, he edited – in great detail – the speech that was given by his deputy, Georgy Malenkov.¹⁰

In tracking Stalin’s pometki, it is tempting to be always on the lookout for deeper meanings and significant connections, both political and psychological. Yet, sometimes, Stalin just read for pleasure and interest, his markings signalling little more than his level of engagement with the text.

Librarian-archivist Yury Sharapov was one of the last people to view the bulk of Stalin’s book collection intact. It was his 1988 memoir that revealed the existence of the dictator’s library and Stalin’s habit of marking books. As he astutely observed, ‘notes made in the margins of books, periodicals or any text . . . form quite a dangerous genre. They betray the author completely – his emotional nature, his intellect, leanings and habits.’¹¹ As the foremost interpretor of Lenin’s pometki, he knew what he was talking about.

It has also proved to be a dangerous genre for scholars searching the library for smoking-gun marginalia that would substantiate their various theories of Stalin’s psychology and motivation. One example is the graphic annotation of a couple of pages of a Russian edition of Anatole France’s Under the Rose, a series of humanist dialogues about the existence and meaning of God. But it turned out that these were made by Svetlana, not Stalin.¹² Svetlana’s style of annotation was similar to her father’s but more florid and irreverent, and harder to make sense of. Examining these markings, a perplexed Yevgeny Gromov concluded that ‘it’s hard to understand what Stalin wanted to express’.¹³

Another example of the perils of over-interpreting Stalin’s pometki is his multiple scribbling of the word uchitel’ (teacher) on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s 1942 play, Ivan Grozny. Stalin could be a bit of a doodler and the word ‘teacher’ features among several other, unrelated and barely legible words and phrases on the back cover.¹⁴ Yet some have chosen to take this as prima facie evidence that Stalin considered Ivan the Terrible his teacher and exemplar.¹⁵ As we see below, Stalin did have a lot of time for the Terrible, but he looked down on all the Tsars, even the Greats such as Peter and Catherine. His one and only true hero and role model was Lenin.

Another mountain made out of a molehill is Stalin’s underlining of this quotation in a 1916 Russian history textbook: ‘The death of the defeated is necessary for the tranquillity of the victors’ – attributed to Genghis Khan.¹⁶ Is that why Stalin killed all those Old Bolsheviks, asked two Russian historians.¹⁷ That Stalin might have been interested in Genghis Khan’s motivation for what the book’s author terms the ‘Tatar Pogroms’ does not seem to have occurred to them.

Another apparently smoking gun spotted by some is the text written at the back of Stalin’s heavily marked 1939 edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:

1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue. NB! If a man is (1) strong (spiritually), 2) active, 3) clever (or capable), then he is good, regardless of any other ‘vices’!¹⁸

According to Donald Rayfield, this was ‘the most significant statement’ Stalin ever made: ‘Stalin’s comment gives a Machiavellian gloss to the credo of a Dostoevskian satanic anti-hero and is an epigraph to his whole career.’¹⁹ Robert Service saw the inscription as ‘intriguing’ and thinks that Stalin, in ‘communing with himself’ and in using ‘the religious language of the spirit and of sin and vice’, was ‘reverting to the discourse of the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary’, his early schooling having ‘left an indelible imprint’.²⁰ Slavoj Žižek considered it ‘as concise as ever a formulation of immoral ethics’.²¹

All very interesting, except the handwriting is not Stalin’s. Who wrote those words and how they came to be inscribed in a book in his library remains mysterious, as does their intended meaning.

In truth, no smoking guns are to be found anywhere in the remains of Stalin’s library. His pometki reveal preoccupations not secrets, and the way he engaged with ideas, arguments and facts.

JOINED AT THE HIP: STALIN, LENIN AND TROTSKY

Stalin revered Lenin. He first met him in December 1905 at a party conference in Tampere, Finland, then an autonomous province of Tsarist Russia. In January 1924, at a memorial meeting for the recently deceased founder of the Soviet state, Stalin recalled that what captivated him about Lenin was the ‘irresistible force of logic’ in his speeches. Other features of Lenin’s political practice that so impressed Stalin were ‘no whining over defeat’; ‘no boasting in victory’; ‘fidelity to principle’; ‘faith in the masses’; and ‘the insight of genius, the ability to rapidly grasp and divine the inner meaning of impending events’.²²

There were hundreds of works by Lenin in Stalin’s book collection, dozens of them marked and annotated. Lenin was Stalin’s most-read author. In Stalin’s own collected writings there are many more references to Lenin than any other person.²³ Stalin was renowned as the master of the Lenin quote. He didn’t just pore over Lenin’s original writings, he read summaries and condensations by other authors, being particularly fond of publications that provided excerpts of Lenin’s writings on the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and other vital issues of the day.²⁴ Another useful crib were collections containing notes and plans for his major speeches, which gave Stalin insight into how Lenin constructed and presented arguments.²⁵ In a book about the reasons for Bolshevik victory in the civil war, Stalin simply highlighted all the quotes from Lenin: the Bolsheviks had won because of international working-class solidarity, because they were united whereas their opponents were divided, and because soldiers had refused to fight against the Soviet government. Lenin’s reference to the failure of Winston Churchill’s prediction that the allies would take Petrograd in September 1919 and Moscow by December was double-lined in the margin.²⁶

In his comprehensive study of Stalin’s political thought, Erik van Ree concluded that his ‘notes in Lenin’s writings are remarkable for their lack of criticism. In the most intensively read books by his predecessor there is no hint of it all.’ The same was true of Marx: ‘I did not find a single critical remark by Stalin.’ While Stalin’s reading of Engels was more critical, his markings of Engels’s books was always attentive and respectful. ‘Only idiots can doubt that Engels was and remains our teacher,’ he wrote to the Politburo in August 1934. ‘But it does not follow from this at all, that we must cover up Engel’s short-comings.’ As van Ree also pointed out, the marked books in his library show that Stalin kept on reading Marx, Engels and Lenin until the very end of his life.²⁷

Stalin’s toast to scientists at a reception for higher education workers in May 1938 is one of his many fulsome tributes to Lenin:

In the course of its development science has known not a few courageous men who were able to break down the old and create the new. . . . Such scientists as Galileo, Darwin . . . I should like to dwell on one of these eminent men of science, one who at the same time was the greatest man of modern times. I am referring to Lenin, our teacher, our tutor. (Applause.) Remember 1917. A scientific analysis of the social development of Russia and of the international situation brought Lenin to the conclusion that the only way out of the situation lay in the victory of socialism in Russia. This conclusion came as a complete surprise to many men of science. . . . Scientists of all kinds set up a howl that Lenin was destroying science. But Lenin was not afraid to go against the current, against the force of routine. And Lenin won (Applause).²⁸

When Stalin devised his library classification schema in May 1925, Trotsky had already emerged as his fiercest rival and a leading opponent in the post-Lenin succession power struggles. Yet Stalin placed Trotsky sixth in the list of Marxist authors whose books were to be separated from the general, subject-based classification scheme. Apart from Marx, Engels and Lenin, only Kautsky (the chief theoretician of German social democracy) and Plekhanov (the founding father of Russian Marxism) were listed ahead of Trotsky. After Trotsky’s name came those of Stalin’s then close allies – Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.

More than forty of Trotsky’s books and pamphlets, including some quite hefty tomes, may be found among the remnants of Stalin’s library, but he was particularly interested in his rival’s ‘factional’ polemics – The New Course (1923) and The Lessons of October (1924). Stalin combed through these and other writings seeking ammunition for his critique of Trotsky and Trotskyism. His withering attacks on Trotsky’s views made his name as a top-class polemicist and consolidated his authority as the party’s general-secretary. At the 15th party conference in November 1926, he was scathing in his criticism of Trotsky’s statement in The New Course that ‘Leninism, as a system of revolutionary action, presumes a revolutionary instinct trained by reflection and experience which, in the social sphere, is equivalent to muscular sensation in physical labour.’ Stalin’s commented: ‘Leninism as “muscular sensation in physical labour”. New and original and very profound, is it not? Can you make head or tail of it? (Laughter).’²⁹

Trotsky, for all his undoubted brilliance as a Marxist intellectual and orator, was an easy target for Stalin. He had a history of criticising Lenin and the Bolsheviks and only joined up with the group in summer 1917. Trotsky tried to airbrush these criticisms but Stalin insisted on reminding the party of his past errors.

He was particularly fond of quoting Trotsky’s 1915 attack on Lenin’s view that proletarian revolution and socialism were possible in a single country, even in culturally backward and economically underdeveloped peasant Russia. At stake was the belief that it would be possible to build socialism in Soviet Russia, Trotsky’s view being that the Russian Revolution needed successful revolutions in more advanced countries if it was not going to be crushed by imperialism and capitalism. Stalin accepted the socialist revolution in Russia would not be ‘finally’ victorious until there was a world revolution, but also believed that Soviet socialism would survive and thrive on its own. The great majority of the Bolshevik party agreed with Stalin, preferring his doctrine of socialism in one country to Trotsky’s advocacy of world revolution as the primary goal.

Like all the leading Bolsheviks, Stalin quoted Lenin selectively to suit his argument. In 1915, for example, Lenin was speculating on the possibility of an advanced country adopting socialism without the support of revolutions in other countries. But Lenin’s views on this matter did evolve post-1917 in response to the reality of a revolution in ‘backward’ Russia that had brought the Bolsheviks to power.³⁰ For Stalin and his supporters within the party, the fact of their successful revolution was all-important, and they did not take kindly to Trotsky’s suggestion in Tasks in the East (1924) that the centre of world revolution could shift to Asia in the absence of European revolutions: ‘Fool!’ wrote Stalin in the margin. ‘With the existence of the Soviet Union the centre cannot be in the East.’³¹

Another favourite target of Stalin’s was The Lessons of October, in which Trotsky dredged up the Kamenev–Zinoviev conflicts with Lenin in 1917. The party was split in 1917, argued Trotsky, and the same rightist Old Bolsheviks were holding it back after the revolution. Only Lenin’s incessant pressure for an insurrection to seize power had saved the day.³²

Kamenev and Zinoviev were old friends and comrades of Stalin’s and his allies in the struggle against Trotsky, so he rose to their defence, even though he personally was not targeted in The Lessons of October. In a 1924 speech on ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’ he accepted there were disagreements in the party in 1917 and admitted that Lenin had correctly steered the Bolsheviks towards a more radical policy of opposing and then overthrowing the Provisional Government. But he denied the party was split and pointed out that when the central committee endorsed Lenin’s proposal for an insurrection it established a political oversight group that included Kamenev and Zinoviev, even though they had voted against the proposed putsch. Stalin also decried what he called the ‘legend’ of Trotsky’s special role in 1917:

I am far from denying Trotsky’s undoubtedly important role in the uprising. I must say, however, that Trotsky did not play any special role. . . . Trotsky did, indeed, fight well in October; but Trotsky was not the only one . . . when the enemy is isolated and uprising is growing, it is not difficult to fight well. At such moments even backward people become heroes.³³

The Lessons of October was not Trotsky’s first attempt to write the history of the Russian Revolution. During the 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations he spent time drafting a short book called Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya, published later that year and then translated into many languages, appearing in English as History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk.³⁴ It was a pro-Bolshevik propaganda effort by Trotsky so he played down differences within the party. This account of the revolution was much to Stalin’s liking. He read and marked the text in detail and with evident satisfaction at its contents. He was particularly interested in Trotsky’s treatment of the ‘July Days’, when the Bolsheviks had drawn back from a premature uprising – an episode that had embedded itself in the party’s historical memory as an object lesson that sometimes political retreats were necessary in order to live and fight another day.³⁵ And, as we have already seen, in his November 1918 Pravda article on the first anniversary of the revolution, Stalin was fulsome in his praise of Trotsky’s role in organising the insurrection.

A 1921 pamphlet on Trotsky by an M. Smolensky, published in Berlin, was part of a series designed to explain Bolshevik ideas to the workers of the world. According to its author, ‘Trotsky was, perhaps, both the most brilliant and the most paradoxical figure in the Bolshevik leadership.’ Stalin did not mark that particular comment but he did underline the author’s next observation – that while Lenin was a socialist ‘bible scholar’ devoted to the sacred texts of Marxism, Trotsky saw it as a method of analysis: ‘if Lenin’s Marxism was dogmatically orthodox, Trotsky’s was methodological’. There followed a series of faint ticks in the margin by Stalin which seemingly expressed approval of a variety of Trotsky’s quoted views. He also margin-lined Trotsky’s contention that there were currently two socialist ideologies in contention with each other – that of the Second (socialist) International and that of the Third (communist) International.³⁶

Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) was a reply to a publication of the same name by Karl Kautsky, the ‘renegade’ the Bolsheviks had once much admired, not least for his staunch defence of revolutionary Marxism against the ‘revisionism’ of Eduard Bernstein, who favoured a more moderate and reformist socialist movement. In his pamphlet, Kautsky criticised the violence and dictatorial methods that the Bolsheviks used to gain and hold power, particularly during the ongoing Russian Civil War. In his reply to Kautsky, Trotsky laid out in stark terms the rationale for the Bolsheviks’ violent seizure of power, their subsequent suppression of Russian constitutional democracy, and their use of ‘Red Terror’ in the civil war. Stalin needed no lessons in realpolitik from Machiavelli, or even Lenin, when he had Trotsky’s text to hand.

We can be fairly sure that Stalin read Trotsky’s book quite close to the time of its publication. The Bolsheviks, including Lenin, were keen to refute Kautsky’s critique, not least because it had undermined their standing in the international socialist movement.

Stalin’s heavily underlined copy of the book was peppered throughout by expressions of approval such as NB and tak (in this context, yes).³⁷ ‘The problem’, wrote Trotsky, ‘is to make a civil war a short one; and this is attained only by resoluteness in action. But it is just against revolutionary resoluteness that Kautsky’s whole book is directed.’ NB, wrote Stalin in the margin. He made the same annotation at the head of Chapter Two on the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and wrote out Trotsky’s statement in the first paragraph that ‘the political autocracy of the proletariat is the “sole form” in which it can realise its control of the state’. In the same chapter, Stalin underlined, double margin-lined and wrote NB alongside Trotsky’s barb that ‘the man who repudiates terrorism in principle i.e. repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the socialist revolution and digs the grave of socialism.’

Trotsky next mounted a prolonged defence of the argument that the interests of socialist revolution trumped the democratic process because the latter was merely a façade behind which the bourgeoisie hid its power. Stalin agreed wholeheartedly and was particularly taken by Trotsky’s quotation of Paul Lafargue’s view that parliamentary democracy constituted little more than an illusion of popular self-government. ‘When the proletariat of Europe and America seizes the State, it will have to organise a revolutionary government and govern society as a dictatorship, until the bourgeoisie has disappeared as a class’ is among the Lafargue quotes underlined by Stalin.

Trotsky justified the Bolsheviks’ dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, saying they signed the decree authorising elections to that body, expecting it to vote to dissolve itself in favour of the more representative Soviets. But ‘the Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside’ (underlined by Stalin).

Stalin liked to number points made by authors and did this to Trotsky’s list of three previous revolutions that had experienced violence, terror and civil war – the sixteenth-century religious Reformation that split the Catholic Church, the English revolutions of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. Trotsky concluded from his historical analysis that ‘the degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal and international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is the resistance of the class enemy who has been overthrown, the more inevitably does the system of repression take the form of a system of terror.’ The underlining of the last subclause is Stalin’s.

Beside the following underlined paragraph, Stalin wrote two expressions of approval, NB and tak:

The Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection, the direct continuation of which it represents. The State terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned ‘morally’ only by a man who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence whatsoever – consequently, every war and every rising. For this one has to be merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker.

When Trotsky wrote that ‘Kautsky has not the least idea of what a revolution is in practice. He thinks that theoretically to reconcile is the same as practically to accomplish’, Stalin underlined the two sentences, and in the margin wrote another of his favourite exclamations of approval – metko (spot on).

According to Trotsky, Kautsky believed the Russian working class had seized power prematurely. To which Trotsky responded: ‘No one gives the proletariat the opportunity of choosing whether it will or will not . . . take power immediately or postpone the moment. Under certain conditions the working class is bound to take power, under the threat of political self-annihilation for a whole historical period.’ This was underlined by Stalin, too, and in the margin he wrote tak!

Trotsky’s clinching argument in favour of the Bolshevik dictatorship was underlined, bracketed and crossed through by Stalin:

We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organisation that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour. In this ‘substitution’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class.

Actually, Stalin was not convinced by Trotsky’s wording here. In the margin he wrote: ‘dictatorship of the party – not exact’, his preferred formulation being that the proletariat ruled through the party. He also expressed doubts about Trotsky’s view that under socialism compulsory labour service was the natural concomitant of the socialisation of the means of production. Stalin signalled scepticism by writing m-da in the margin several times.³⁸ By the time of the 10th party congress in March 1921, Stalin’s questioning of Trotsky’s position had hardened into outright opposition to his proposals for the militarisation of labour.

Stalin had his own copy of the Russian translation of Kautsky’s original text, which he read as attentively as Trotsky’s rejoinder.³⁹ The margins of the Kautsky book were liberally sprinkled with the ridiculing ‘ha ha’ and ‘hee hee’ as well as choice insults such svoloch’ (swine) and lzhets (liar). When Kautsky argued that Bolshevik intransigence was based on their claim to a monopoly of truth, Stalin responded that he was a durak (fool) for believing that all knowledge was provisional and limited. The same kind of invective may be found written in other Kautsky books that Stalin read. ‘Only he can mix up the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of a clique’, he wrote in a 1922 copy of Kautsky’s The Proletarian Revolution and Its Programme.⁴⁰ ‘Rubbish’, ‘nonsense’, wrote Stalin, when Kautsky claimed that another revolutionary crisis in nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary would have doomed the Czechs to Germanisation.⁴¹ Yet he read and marked many sections of Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism without further comment. There were even a few NBs and one or two m-das in the margin. The same indicators of positive interest in the substantive detail of Kautsky’s many writings may be found in Stalin’s reading and marking of other works, particularly those that dealt with economic affairs and the ‘Agrarian Question’, Kautsky being an acknowledged Marxist expert on these topics.⁴² Always on the lookout for useful information and arguments, Stalin was willing to learn from even the most despised opponents.

At the central committee plenum in July 1926, Stalin claimed that hitherto he had ‘held a moderate, not openly inimical stand against Trotsky’ and ‘had kept to a moderate policy towards him’.⁴³ His close reading of Trotsky’s technical-economic writings of the mid-1920s – Towards Socialism or Capitalism? (1925); 8 Years: Results and Perspectives (1926); and Our New Tasks (1926) – suggests this might have been true. These works date from the period when Trotsky, having been forced to step down as war commissar in January 1925, was a member of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, which controlled Soviet industry.

Trotsky was sceptical about the New Economic Policy as a strategy for socialism but was a moderate critic compared to some hard-line leftists within the Bolshevik party. He believed that NEP’s revival of the market in agriculture had over-empowered the so-called kulaks or rich peasants. He also saw the danger of a capitalist restoration across the economy and thought that socialist industrialisation was being neglected. Stalin’s marking without comment of many passages in Trotsky’s writings indicates that he shared these concerns to some extent but he was more optimistic about NEP’s capacity to generate the resources necessary to pay for socialist industrialisation. He was also confident the party and the proletariat could continue to dominate the peasants, their much larger numbers notwithstanding.⁴⁴ However, when food supplies to the cities were threatened by peasant hoarding at the end of the 1920s, Stalin did not hesitate to abandon NEP and force through, at great human cost, accelerated industrialisation and the forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. Many of Trotsky’s supporters hailed Stalin’s ‘left turn’ and supported his struggle against the so-called Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin, who resisted the abandonment of NEP. Trotsky himself thought Stalin had gone too far too fast. He even began to think that ‘market socialism’ – the underpinning model of NEP – had some merits after all.⁴⁵

The biggest differences between Stalin and Trotsky concerned the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’, which was a dispute about whether or not socialist construction at home should take priority over spreading the revolution abroad. Yet Trotsky was as committed as Stalin to building socialism in the USSR, and while Stalin de-prioritised world revolution, he didn’t abandon it. This was an important strategic difference but it did not constitute an unbridgeable ideological gulf. It was factional battles and the narcissism of small differences that escalated such disagreements into an existential struggle for the soul of the Bolshevik party.

Trotsky was expelled from the party and sent into exile at the end of the 1920s. To an extent, he was the author of his own misfortune.⁴⁶ It was Trotsky who launched the ‘history wars’ about who had done what during the revolution. In 1923 it was Trotsky who broke the unity of the Politburo leadership collective that had assumed control when Lenin was stricken by a series of strokes. As head of the Commission on State Industry, he proposed acceleration of socialist industrialisation and modification of NEP’s strategy of gradual economic growth based on peasant capitalism and small-scale private production. Piling the pressure onto his leadership colleagues, Trotsky organised a campaign within the party that accused the Politburo majority, headed by a triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, of constituting a ‘factional dictatorship’. It was this same campaign that led to the publication of The New Course by Pravda in December 1923. However, the matter was settled by a resounding victory for the triumvirate at the 13th party conference in January 1924.⁴⁷

Trotsky’s next move was an opportunistic and ill-advised alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev, who, now much more left-wing than they were in 1917, had fallen out with Stalin over NEP and socialism in one country and wanted the party to adopt a more militant approach. Like Trotsky’s Left Opposition of 1923, the United Opposition of Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev attempted to rally support within the party but was overwhelmed by the power and popularity of Stalin, at this time closely allied to Bukharin, a former Left Communist who had moved rightwards and emerged as the leading theorist of NEP as a gradualist political and economic strategy for socialism.⁴⁸

In October 1926 Trotsky was removed from the Politburo and a year later from the central committee, as were Kamenev and Zinoviev. In November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party and the rout was completed by the 15th party congress in December 1927, which excluded seventy-five oppositionists, including Kamenev, from its ranks. Those expulsions triggered a purge of the United Opposition’s grassroots activists.

Kamenev and Zinoviev, together with many of their supporters, quickly recanted their opposition to the majority line and were soon readmitted to the party. Trotsky stood his ground, declaring that the party, like the French Revolution in 1794, had been captured by counter-revolutionary ‘Thermidorian forces’. In January 1928 he was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan.

A philosophical as well as a political logic underlay what Igal Halfin has called the ‘demonization’ of the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin’s majority faction in the party.⁴⁹ Kautsky was right. The Bolsheviks believed their movement was armed with a scientific theory of society and history that gave them – and only them – access to absolute truth. Their party and its leaders had proven themselves in the crucible of revolution and civil war and were now building the world’s first socialist society – an endeavour that would lead all of humanity to a classless and oppression-free utopia. Within this Weltanschauung, opposition to the party majority was inconceivable except as a deviation expressive of the insidious influence of class enemies.

As Trotsky put it at the 13th party congress in May 1924:

Comrades, none of us wishes to be or can be right when against the Party. In the last instance the Party is always right because it is the only historical instrument in the hands of the working class. . . . The English have a saying: ‘My country, right or wrong.’ We may say, and with much greater justice: ‘My party, right or wrong.’⁵⁰

Demonisation of dissent within the party was a gradual process that took place over several years. Initially, dissenters were deemed a ‘petty-bourgeois deviation’ that was objectively but not knowingly counter-revolutionary. Then the opposition came to be characterised as anti-party and actively counter-revolutionary.

One widely distributed critique of Trotskyism in the mid-1920s was Semen Kanatchikov’s History of One Deviation, which portrayed Trotsky as an isolated individualist who had rejected party discipline and gathered around himself ‘loners’ prone to hysterical panic. We don’t know if Stalin read the book but there was certainly a copy in his library, together with several other Kanatchikov publications.⁵¹

Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928 for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, but was allowed to continue his factionalising by post. Accused of being involved in ‘anti-Soviet’ activities, he was exiled to Turkey in 1929 and deprived of his Soviet citizenship in 1932.

Trotsky published a number of notable books after he was expelled from the Soviet Union: The History of the Russian Revolution (1930); My Life (1930); The Permanent Revolution (1931); The Revolution Betrayed (1936); and The Stalin School of Falsification (1937). Apart from a 1931 German-language book on fascism, no post-expulsion works by Trotsky are to be found among the remnants of Stalin’s library. Dmitry Volkogonov claimed that ‘Stalin read the translation of The Revolution Betrayed in a single night, seething with bile’, but, typically, cites no source.⁵² Stephen Kotkin reports that ‘the omnipotent dictator . . . maintained a collection of everything written by and about Trotsky in a special cupboard in his study at the Near Dacha’, but he provides no evidence either.⁵³ Certainly, Stalin was kept well informed about Trotsky’s activities abroad and about his efforts to stay in touch with oppositionists who remained in the USSR. He also received a stream of reports from his security services about their repression of so-called ‘Trotskyist groups’.⁵⁴

STALIN’S TERROR

At the beginning of the 1930s Stalin was seemingly sanguine about the threat posed by Trotsky and Trotskyism. ‘The gentlemen in the Trotsky camp chattered about the “degeneration” of the Soviet regime, about “Thermidor”, about the “inevitable victory” of Trotskyism,’ Stalin told delegates to the 16th party congress in June 1930. ‘But, actually, what happened? What happened was the collapse, the end of Trotskyism.’⁵⁵ In his 1931 letter to Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya, Stalin expressed concern not about the strength of Trotskyism but about its misidentification as a faction of communism, when, ‘as a matter of fact, Trotskyism is the advanced detachment of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie’.⁵⁶ Talking to Emil Ludwig in December 1931, Stalin insisted that Trotsky had been largely forgotten by Soviet workers and if they did remember him it was ‘with bitterness, with exasperation, with hatred’.⁵⁷ At the 17th party congress in January 1934 – the so-called ‘Congress of Victors’ – Stalin said nothing about Trotsky except that ‘the anti-Leninist group of Trotskyists has been smashed and scattered. Its organisers are now to be found in the backyards of bourgeois parties abroad.’⁵⁸

Stalin was shaken from his complacency by the shooting dead in December 1934 of Leningrad party secretary Sergei M. Kirov. He rushed to Leningrad to personally interrogate the perpetrator, Leonid Nikolaev. On the way he drafted a draconian decree that abrogated the rights of those accused of terrorism and streamlined their prosecution, conviction and execution. This became the legal basis for thousands of summary shootings during the ensuing campaign of state-sponsored terror against Stalin’s political opponents.⁵⁹

Nikolaev was, in fact, a lone assassin who gunned down Kirov outside his office because of a personal grudge. But suspicions still linger that Stalin was the architect of Kirov’s killing. Like most conspiracy theories about Stalin, there is no hard evidence for such a claim.⁶⁰ Not even Trotsky thought Stalin guilty of this particular crime, although he rightly feared it would be used as a pretext for a further crackdown on the anti-Stalinist opposition.⁶¹

Stalin had his own conspiracy theory: Kirov was a victim of the Zinovievites. On 16 December, Kamenev and Zinoviev were arrested. On 29 December, Nikolaev and thirteen alleged associates were executed, while Kamenev and Zinoviev were imprisoned for abetting the murder. In 1935 hundreds of former Zinovievites were rounded up and the scope of the investigation was broadened to include former Trotskyists.

In his coerced confession, Zinoviev said: ‘Because we were unable to properly submit to the party, merge with it completely but instead continued to look backward and to live our separate, stifling lives – because of all that, we were doomed to the kind of political dualism that produces double-dealing’.⁶²

In June 1935 Stalin’s deputy security chief, Nikolai Yezhov, presented a report to the central committee claiming that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky were ‘the active organisers of the murder of comrade Kirov, as well as of the attempt on the life of Comrade Stalin that was being prepared within the Kremlin’.⁶³

The latter charge was a reference to the so-called ‘Kremlin Affair’, which began when three cleaners confessed to spreading slander about the state and its leaders. Among those implicated in anti-Soviet activities were three librarians working in the Kremlin’s government library. Of the 110 Kremlin staff arrested, 108 were imprisoned or exiled and two shot.⁶⁴

Stalin was fond of giving lessons in realpolitik to soft-hearted western intellectuals and in June 1935 he told the well-known French writer Romain Rolland that a hundred armed agents from Germany, Poland and Finland had been shot for plotting terrorist attacks on Kirov and other Soviet leaders:

Such is the logic of power. In these conditions power must be strong, hard and fearless. Otherwise it’s not power and won’t be recognised as such. The French Communards didn’t understand this, they were too soft and indecisive. Consequently, they lost, and the French bourgeoisie was merciless. That’s the lesson for us. . . . It is very unpleasant for us to kill. This is a dirty business. Better to be out of politics and keep one’s hands clean, but we don’t have the right to stay out of politics if we want to liberate enslaved people. When you agree to engage in politics, then you do everything not for yourself but only for the state. The state demands that we are pitiless.⁶⁵

He also told Rolland about the Kremlin Affair:

We have a government library, which has female librarians who can enter the apartments of responsible comrades in the Kremlin in order to tidy up their libraries. It turns out that some of these librarians had been recruited by our enemies for the purposes of terrorism. It has to be said that these librarians are remnants of the old, defeated ruling classes – the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. We found out that these women had poison and intended to poison some of our officials.⁶⁶

Egged on by Yezhov, Stalin decided to stage a public trial of Kamenev, Zinoviev and fourteen others accused of being the leaders of a ‘United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre’ that had organised the network that killed Kirov and plotted to assassinate other Soviet leaders. Stalin, together with Chief State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, drafted the detailed indictment and the trial took place in Moscow in August 1936. Having confessed to their crimes, all sixteen defendants were found guilty and executed. Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, were sentenced to death in absentia.

As Wendy Goldman so aptly summarises events so far: ‘The case, which began in December 1934 with a domestic murder and a lone gunman, now involved sixteen defendants, multiple murder plots, foreign spies, fascist contacts, and terrorist conspiracies. The initial objective, to find and punish Kirov’s assassin, had expanded into a nationwide attack on the former left opposition.’⁶⁷

The arraignment of Zinoviev and Kamenev was in line with an established and well-rehearsed Soviet tradition, inspired in part by the political trials of radicals staged by Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century.⁶⁸ The first trial was of the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary party in 1922, accused of being involved in armed struggle and subversive activities against the state. That same year priests and lay believers who had resisted the Bolsheviks’ expropriation of church valuables were tried. In 1928 a large group of engineers and managers in the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were tried for conspiracy to sabotage the town’s coal mines. At the ‘Industrial Party’ trial of 1930, Soviet scientists and engineers were accused of conspiring with foreign powers to wreck the USSR’s economy. In 1931 a group of ‘Menshevik’ economists was tried for using disinformation to undermine the first five-year plan. In 1933 six British employees of Metro-Vickers, a company contracted to install electrical equipment, were prosecuted for economic wrecking and espionage.

But the charges levelled against Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936 were far more serious, since those indicted were Old Bolshevik leaders who had once been among Stalin’s closest comrades-in-arms. It was a piece of crude political theatre whose none-too-subtle message was that even top leaders could turn out to be traitors and that no enemy of the system could hide from state security.

In January 1937 Stalin staged a trial of members of an ‘Anti-Soviet Parallel Trotskyist Centre’ – said to be a reserve network in the event the Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre was exposed. The main defendants were the former deputy commissar for heavy industry, Georgy Pyatakov, former Izvestiya editor Karl Radek, and Grigory Sokolnikov, the former deputy commissar for foreign affairs. They and fourteen others were accused of treason, espionage and wrecking, their ultimate aim being to take power and restore capitalism in the USSR after it had been militarily defeated by Germany and Japan. Mostly former Trotskyists, the great majority of the accused were sentenced to death following their confession-based trial. The defendants implicated the leaders of the so-called Right Opposition – Bukharin and the former prime minister Alexei Rykov. These two were expelled from the party in March 1937, paving the way for their arrest, and the staging a year later of the third and last of the great Moscow show trials – the trial of the ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites’. At this trial Bukharin and Rykov duly confessed to conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow Soviet power and, together with most of their co-defendants, were sentenced to death and executed.⁶⁹ The third leader of the so-called Right Opposition, the former head of the Soviet trade unions Mikhail Tomsky, escaped that gruesome fate by shooting himself in August 1936.

It is hard to credit that Stalin actually believed the absurd charges levelled against these former members of the Soviet political elite or that he gave any credence to the fantastical confessions upon which they rested. But, to paraphrase that adage about supporters of President Donald J. Trump, while Stalin took the confessions seriously he did not take them literally. Arguably, while his general belief in the existence of an anti-Soviet conspiracy was unshakeable, the detailed veracity of the specific confessions was another matter entirely.

In their analysis of the Great Terror, J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov distinguish between Yezhov, who truly believed in the existence of the enemies he hunted down on Stalin’s behalf, and Bukharin, who chose to serve Stalin by falsely confessing to being one. Yezhov, who was appointed head of the NKVD in September 1936, embraced official discourse as a description of reality; to Bukharin it was an invention, a drama in which he was prepared to play his prescribed role in order to safeguard the Soviet system.⁷⁰ Stalin seems to have been a hybrid case. For him the conspiracy against Soviet power was as real as it was for Yezhov but he knew the truth was more complex and contradictory than the story framed for the show trials.

It was the February–March 1937 plenum of the party’s central committee that set the scene for a general purge of Soviet polity and society. In 1937–8 alone there were a million and a half political arrests and hundreds of thousands of executions. Stalin told the plenum that the ‘wrecking and diversionist-espionage’ activities of foreign agents had impacted on nearly all party and state bodies, which had been infiltrated by Trotskyists.

The party had underestimated the dangers facing the Soviet state in conditions of ‘capitalist encirclement’, said Stalin, notably the penetration of the USSR by numerous imperialist wreckers, spies, diversionists and killers. Pretending to be loyal communists, the Trotskyists had ‘deceived our people politically, abused confidence, wrecked on the sly, and revealed our state secrets to the enemies of the Soviet Union’.

The strength of the party, said Stalin, lay in its connection to the masses. By way of illustration he cited the ancient Greek myth of Antaeus, the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and of Gaea, goddess of the earth. In battle, Antaeus was invincible because of the strength he drew from his mother via the earth. But one day an enemy appeared who vanquished him. It was Hercules, who held him aloft and prevented him from touching the ground:

I think that the Bolsheviks remind us of the hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. They, like Antaeus, are strong because they maintain connection with their mother, the masses who gave birth to them, suckled them and reared them. And as long as they maintain connection with their mother, with the people, they have every chance of remaining invincible.⁷¹

The military purge began in May 1937 with the arrest of Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky and seven other Soviet generals, who were accused of a fascist plot to overthrow the government.

Stalin’s doubts about the loyalty of the Red Army dated back to the civil war debate about the recruitment of bourgeois military specialists. In the 1920s White émigré circles fantasised about Tukhachevsky as a ‘Red Napoleon’ and there were fears the armed forces would be infiltrated by former Tsarist officers. There were many Trotsky supporters in the highly politicised armed forces and in 1927 the head of Stalin’s political police warned him they were plotting a military coup. During the forced collectivisation campaign, elements of the Red Army wavered when faced with orders to seize peasant lands and produce.

None of this stopped Tukhachevsky from rising to the rank of deputy defence commissar or from being promoted to marshal in 1935. But Stalin’s attitude towards him changed drastically during the feverish atmosphere that developed after Kirov’s assassination. The trigger for his arrest seems to have been a report from Voroshilov in early May 1937 that the armed forces had been infiltrated by foreign agents and that sabotage and espionage were rife.⁷² After a summary trial, Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were executed, as were several thousand other officers, in an extensive purge that lasted until the end of 1938. Among those who perished were three marshals, sixteen generals, fifteen admirals, 264 colonels, 107 majors and seventy-one lieutenants. By the time the purge had run its course, 34,000 officers had been dismissed from service, although 11,500 of them were later reinstated.

On 2 June 1937, Stalin addressed the country’s Military Council about the existence of a military-political conspiracy against Soviet power. Its political leaders were Trotsky, Rykov and Bukharin; its military core, the High Command group led by Tukhachevsky. The chief organiser of this conspiracy was Trotsky, who dealt directly with the Germans, while Tukhachevsky’s group acted as agents of the Reichswehr, which controlled them like ‘marionettes and puppets’.

Stalin cautioned against persecuting people just because they had a dubious political background but bemoaned the weakness of Soviet intelligence services, which were ‘childlike’ compared to those of bourgeois states. Intelligence was the Soviet state’s eyes and ears and, for the first time in twenty years, it had suffered a severe defeat, he said.⁷³

Stalin was also perturbed by the subversive activities of so-called kulaks, allegedly rich peasants who had been deprived of their property during the forced collectivisation drive. In early July 1937, the Politburo directed local and regional party leaders to draw up lists of anti-Soviet ‘kulaks and criminals’ who had returned home from deportation exile in Siberia, ‘so that the most dangerous of them can be arrested and shot’.⁷⁴ At the end of that month the Politburo approved a proposal from the NKVD to repress nearly 300,000 kulaks and criminals, including more than 72,000 summary executions. The stated rationale for this ‘mass operation’ was that anti-Soviet elements were involved in extensive crime, sabotage and subversion, not only in the countryside but in urban areas, too. By the end of the operation, the NKVD had exceeded its target for arrests by 150 per cent and for executions by over 400 per cent.⁷⁵

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 had reinforced Stalin’s fears concerning the interaction of foreign and domestic threats. General Francisco Franco’s military mutiny against the country’s leftist government was supported by troops and munitions from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Stalin backed the Republic’s democratically elected government and some 2,000 Soviet military personnel served in Spain alongside the Comintern’s 40,000 volunteers in the International Brigades. He was convinced that Franco’s military successes were the result of sabotage and subversion behind the front lines.⁷⁶

Spanish communists were in the vanguard of the anti-fascist struggle but there was also a strong anarchist movement and a small but vocal semi-Trotskyist party called POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). In the context of the unfolding Great Terror in the USSR, the POUM leftists, who sought a more radical revolution in Spain than the communists, were categorised as Nazi and fascist agents provocateurs. In May 1937 a POUM revolt in Barcelona was put down viciously, including the abduction and execution by Soviet agents of their leader, Andrés Nin.

Stalin became obsessed with the damage that ‘wreckers and spies’ could do if the Soviet Union was attacked by foreign powers and considered Spain an object lesson in that regard. ‘They want to turn the USSR into another Spain,’ he told the Military Council in June 1937.⁷⁷

In November 1937 Stalin received into his Kremlin office the head of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian who was in Berlin in 1933 when Hitler came to power and was arrested by the Nazis for complicity in the burning down of the Reichstag. Deported to the Soviet Union in February 1934, it was Dimitrov who, with Stalin’s support, steered the Comintern towards the politics of anti-fascist unity. He delivered the main report at the Comintern’s 7th World Congress in Moscow in August 1935 and was elected its general-secretary, a position he retained until the organisation was dissolved in 1943. Dimitrov developed a close working relationship with Stalin and his notes on their confidential conversations in his personal diary are highly revealing.

Stalin told Dimitrov that the Comintern’s policy on the struggle against Trotskyism did not go far enough: ‘Trotskyites must be hunted down, shot, destroyed. These are international provocateurs, fascism’s most vicious agents.’⁷⁸

After several attempts, the NKVD did finally manage to assassinate Trotsky, in Mexico in August 1940. Stalin himself edited the Pravda article about his death. He changed the headline from ‘Inglorious Death of Trotsky’ to ‘Death of an International Spy’ and added this sentence to the end of the unsigned article: ‘Trotsky was a victim of his own intrigues, treachery and treason. Thus ended ingloriously the life of this despicable person, who went to his grave with “international spy” stamped on his forehead.’⁷⁹

Stalin’s orchestration of the Great Terror was an awesome demonstration of his power within the Soviet system. Equally, only he had the power to end the purge. In summer 1938, the Politburo took steps to curb arrests and executions and curtail the activities of the NKVD. In November 1938 Yezhov resigned, confessing that he had failed to root out traitors within the NKVD who had conspired to target innocent people. Arrested in April 1939, he was shot in February 1940. His successor as security chief was Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Georgian communist party.⁸⁰

At the 18th party congress in March 1939, Stalin declared victory over the enemies of the people and an end to mass purges. The party had ‘blundered’ in not unmasking sooner top-level foreign intelligence agents like Trotsky and Bukharin, he admitted. This resulted from an underestimation of the dangers posed by the capitalist encirclement of the Soviet Union. He linked this deficiency to the Marxist theory of the withering away of the state under socialism, a doctrine that needed to be updated in the light of historical experience. A strong Soviet state was necessary to protect the socialist system from internal and external enemies.⁸¹

SPYMANIA

Stalin disdained spies, even the ones who spied for him. A spy, he once said, ‘should be full of poison and gall; he must not believe anyone’. Intensely suspicious, he didn’t even trust his own spies, fearful they might have been ‘turned’ by the enemy. Famously – and disastrously – he discounted numerous warnings from Soviet spies that the Germans would attack the USSR in summer 1941, thinking he had a better grasp of Hitler’s intentions than did they. On one report from a high-level informant in the German air force, Stalin told his intelligence chief that he should tell him ‘to go fuck his mother. This is a disinformer, not a “source”’ – a comment written in green rather than his usual red or blue.⁸²

He had more time for intelligence officers, as opposed to spies, and valued mundane intelligence-gathering activities such as compiling press cuttings from bourgeois newspapers. At a reception for Winston Churchill in Moscow in August 1942, he proposed a toast to military intelligence officers: ‘They were the eyes and ears of their country . . . honourably and tirelessly serving their people . . . good people who selflessly served their state.’⁸³

R. H. Bruce Lockhart, who served as vice-consul in Russia before the First World War, was the most famous British spy of the early twentieth century. He returned to Russia after the outbreak of war and was there in 1917 when the Tsar fell, remaining until just before the Bolshevik takeover. He went back to Russia again in January 1918, ostensibly as British consul-general, but his true mission was to organise a spy network. He became involved in a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik government but was arrested after a failed attempt to assassinate Lenin in August 1918. He evaded trial and a possible death sentence by being exchanged for Maxim Litvinov, the Bolshevik diplomatic representative in London, who had been arrested by the British.

Bruce Lockhart’s 1932 Memoirs of a British Agent was a huge hit across the world and his publishers, with an eye to the White émigré market, also had them translated into Russian, an edition that came into Stalin’s possession. He had no interest in Lockhart’s stories of derring-do but underlined his observation that ‘Trotsky was a great organiser and a man of immense physical courage. Morally, however, he was no more able to stand up to Lenin than a flea to an elephant.’⁸⁴

In September 1937 Yezhov sent Stalin a translation of Major Charles Rossel’s Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. He may have been prompted to do so by Stalin’s great interest in a big Pravda article of May 1937 on the recruitment of spies by foreign intelligence agents.⁸⁵ Stalin edited that article and contributed to it a story about how Japanese intelligence had recruited a Soviet citizen working in Japan by using an aristocratic Japanese woman as bait.⁸⁶

Stalin’s copy of the Rossel book was no. 743 of a restricted-circulation print run of 750 aimed at Soviet intelligence officers. Rossel, an American, based the book on his lectures to military audiences in New York. Its Soviet editor was Nikolai Rubinstein, who headed a special NKVD unit dedicated to gathering information on the modus operandi of western intelligence agencies. Rossel’s book, wrote Rubinstein in his introduction, would inform Soviet readers about the structure of the US system of intelligence and counter-intelligence as well as provide a lot of useful practical advice on how to conduct such work.

The lectures focused on the experience of military intelligence during the First World War. Rossel noted how the Germans had infiltrated spies into other countries long before the war began. He identified three categories of spy: the permanent, the once-off and the accidental. His concluding advice to intelligence officers operating abroad was that they should stay away from women, read the local newspapers and talk to ordinary people.

Soviet fears of foreign intelligence operations were a constant but there were two really intense bouts of ‘spymania’: the ‘Yezhovshchina’ (the Yezhov thing) or Great Terror of 1937–8, and the ‘Zhdanovshchina’ (the Zhdanov thing) of the mid- to late 1940s. Named after Stalin’s ideology chief Andrei Zhdanov, the latter was a cultural campaign to reverse the penetration of Soviet society by western influences that occurred because of the USSR’s wartime coalition with Britain and the United States. It coincided with the outbreak of the cold war and heralded a return to the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and anxiety of the Great Terror years. In Leningrad, a purge of the party leadership involved accusations of spying and espionage. The Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded amid arrests of its members for being Zionists and Jewish nationalists. One arrestee was Molotov’s Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, who was expelled from the party and exiled to Kazakhstan. Molotov remained a member of the party leadership but was replaced as foreign minister by one of his deputies, none other than the former state prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky. A minor casualty was the left-wing journalist and long-time supporter of the Soviet Union Anna Louise Strong, who was deported from the USSR on the foot of allegations that she was an American spy.

The cultural cold war was as intense as the east–west political struggle and in 1949 the Soviets published a book called The Truth about American Diplomats. Its nominal author was Annabelle Bucar, an American citizen employed by the United States Information Service in the US embassy in Moscow until she left her post in February 1948, ostensibly because she had fallen in love with an opera star, Konstantin Lapshin, said by some to be the nearest Soviet equivalent to Frank Sinatra. Walter Bedell Smith, the US ambassador at that time, claimed in his memoirs that she defected because Soviet citizens were not allowed to marry foreigners.⁸⁷

Concocted to counter western propaganda about Soviet spies, minister for state security Victor Abakumov sent Stalin a dummy of the Russian translation and asked permission to publish it with a big print run.⁸⁸ Stalin made one or two minor factual corrections and wrote on the book’s front cover, ‘And will it be published in English, French and Spanish?’⁸⁹

The book caused a sensation.⁹⁰ The initial 10,000 copies of the Russian edition were snapped up, as were the 100,000 copies of a second printing. In March 1949 the Politburo decreed 200,000 more copies should be printed. It was also published in many other languages, including those requested by Stalin. A film based on the book, Proshchai, Amerika! (Farewell, America), was to be made by a well-known Soviet filmmaker, Alexander Dovzhenko, a Stalin favourite.⁹¹

Bucar’s book detailed how the American embassy in Moscow was a nest of spies: ‘The American diplomatic service is an intelligence organisation’, a sentence that Stalin underlined in his copy of the published book. Stalin’s reading and marking of the book as if it was a briefing document from his intelligence officials was not unreasonable, since they were the main source of its information and analyses, not Bucar, who had been a low-level member of the embassy’s staff. The chapter to which Stalin paid most attention was entitled ‘The Leadership of the Anti-Soviet Clique in the State Department’.

Duly noted by Stalin was the main culprit, George F. Kennan, the former chargé d’affaires in the Moscow embassy who had recently found fame as the outed anonymous author of the ‘X’ article on ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’. Published by the influential American journal Foreign Affairs in July 1947, the article argued that the Soviet Union was a messianic, expansionist state that should be contained by the adroit deployment of countervailing power. It was widely seen as a key influence on the American turn towards confrontation with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.

Kennan was characterised by Bucar as the representative of aggressive anti-Soviet circles in the United States and as a key figure in efforts to reverse President Roosevelt’s policy of co-operation with the USSR. Another sentence underlined by Stalin was Kennan’s supposed statement that ‘war between the USA and the Soviet Union was inevitable’ and that the United States could not tolerate the continued existence of a successful socialist system. The policy of containing communism that Kennan favoured was, wrote Bucar, being used by him to justify America’s domination of the whole world.⁹²

Kennan, who spoke fluent Russian, met Stalin on at least two occasions and penned this memorable portrait of the Soviet dictator:

His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed they often were. . . . Stalin’s greatness as a dissimulator was an integral part of his greatness as a statesman. So was his gift for simple, plausible, ostensibly innocuous utterance. Wholly unoriginal in every creative sense, he had always been the aptest of pupils. He possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation. . . . I was never in doubt, when visiting him, that I was in the presence of one of the world’s most remarkable men – a man great, if you will, primarily in his iniquity: ruthless, cynical, cunning, endlessly dangerous; but for all of this – one of the truly great men of the age.⁹³

Kennan returned to Moscow in May 1952 as the US ambassador but on a stopover in Berlin in September he complained to reporters about his personal isolation in Moscow, comparing it to how the Germans had treated him in Berlin after Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941. Pravda attacked his ‘slanderous’ remarks and he was declared persona non grata as a diplomat – the only US ambassador ever expelled from the Soviet Union. Such an extreme sanction could only have been imposed (though not necessarily proposed) by Stalin himself. It was an unfortunate move, since Kennan had abrogated his hard-line views on Stalin and the Soviets. As a Russophile, the expulsion hurt Kennan deeply, but that did not stop him becoming the foremost western advocate of détente with the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s.⁹⁴

BISMARCK, NOT MACHIAVELLI

Among the books Stalin borrowed and failed to return to the Lenin Library was a Russian edition of the memoirs of Otto von Bismarck.⁹⁵ When he was sent a list of books on foreign policy earmarked for reissue or translation into Russian, the item that caught his eye was a new, three-volume translation of Bismarck’s memoirs, the first volume of which was ready and with the publisher. Stalin wrote in the margin: ‘Definitely translate the second volume as well and publish it together with the first.’⁹⁶

Appealing to Stalin would have been Bismarck’s political realism, pragmatism and tactical flexibility. Another trait the two men had in common was the ability to combine strategic vision with successful short-term manoeuvring in complex situations. Their politics may have been polar opposites but, like Stalin, the ‘Iron Chancellor’ was a concentrator and centraliser of state power. As a devotee of Marxist teleology, Stalin may well have appreciated Bismarck’s aphorism that ‘political judgement is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history’.⁹⁷

The introduction to the first volume of Bismarck’s translated memoirs was written by the historian Arkady Yerusalimsky (1901–1965), a specialist on German foreign policy, who was summoned to Stalin’s Kremlin office for a discussion about his piece. Stalin had a pre-publication ‘dummy’ of the book, which he had marked, including entitling Yerusalimsky’s introductory article ‘Bismarck as Diplomat’. To make the changes required by Stalin, Yerusalimsky took the dummy away with him and it eventually ended up in the hands of the Soviet historian and dissident Mikhail Gefter (1918–1995). According to Gefter, Yerusalimsky told him that Stalin didn’t like his emphasis on Bismarck’s warning that Germany should not go to war with Russia. ‘Why are you scaring them?’ asked Stalin. ‘Let them try.’⁹⁸

Fellow dissident Roy Medvedev reports that Gefter showed him Stalin’s copy of the first volume of a 1940 edition of Bismarck’s ‘collected works’ in the 1960s. In that book, recalled Medvedev, Stalin had marked the editor’s observation that Bismarck had always warned against Germany becoming involved in a two-front war against Russia and western powers. In the margin Stalin wrote, ‘Don’t frighten Hitler’. It seems likely that the book in question was, in fact, this first volume of Bismarck’s memoirs.⁹⁹

Yerusalimsky’s meeting with Stalin, on 23 September 1940, lasted thirty-five minutes and was recorded in Stalin’s appointments diary. The next day deputy foreign commissar Solomon Lozovsky wrote to Stalin that the requested changes to Yerusalimsky’s introduction would be completed by the end of the day. However, the proposal to move the explanatory notes from the end of the book to the end of each chapter would necessitate pulping the 50,000 copies that had already been printed. He proposed instead – and Stalin agreed – that those copies should be published as they stood but the notes would be shifted in time for the next print run.

All three volumes were published in 1940–41.¹⁰⁰ After Stalin’s death, volumes 1 and 2 were listed by IMEL as marked books in his personal library.¹⁰¹ But, like the Bismarck book he borrowed from the Lenin Library, they are no longer listed as part of the archive’s holdings. There are various reports of items from Stalin’s book collection ending up in private hands and that may have been the fate of these Bismarck volumes.

Nikolai Ryzhkov, prime minister of the USSR from 1985 to 1991, wrote in his 1992 memoir that he came into possession of Stalin’s copy of an 1869 Russian edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Heavily marked by Stalin, wrote Ryzhkov, the book was the ‘dictator’s textbook’: ‘Sometimes I think about gathering together all Stalin’s underlinings, putting them in order and publishing them as his digest of Machiavelli. Then there would be no need for Medvedev, Volkogonov, Cohen . . . or any of the other biographies and interpretations of Stalin.’¹⁰²

Another story about Stalin and Machiavelli is that during his final exile in Siberia, when his then good friend and comrade Lev Kamenev was researching the Italian philosopher’s writings, Stalin apparently found a copy of The Prince in the local library and plied Kamenev with questions about the history and politics of Machiavelli’s era.

This story’s source was Boris Nikolaevsky, a Menshevik historian and activist who was exiled abroad by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s.¹⁰³

In the 1930s Kamenev contributed a preface to a Russian translation of The Prince. At Kamenev’s show trial in August 1936, prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky quoted his laudatory words about Machiavelli as ‘a master of political aphorism and a brilliant dialectician’. Machiavelli, said Vyshinsky, was Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s ‘spiritual predecessor’, though he ‘was a puppy and a yokel compared to them’. We don’t know if Stalin read Kamenev’s Machiavelli piece, but he did read his 1933 biography of the nineteenth-century revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky and marked this sentence: ‘A politician is always dealing with power – challenging, exercising or implementing it’.¹⁰⁴

Another Stalin and Machiavelli story was related by Fedor Burlatsky, who worked in the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the 1950s. His source was Stalin’s private secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, who told him that Stalin periodically borrowed The Prince from the central committee library and then returned it after a few days.¹⁰⁵

While none of these claims has been verified, it is possible, likely even, that Stalin did read Machiavelli, but it was history that informed Stalin’s knowledge and understanding of the exercise of power, not philosophy or political theory.

Another book about the ‘Iron Chancellor’ that attracted Stalin’s attention was Wolfgang Windelband’s Bismarck and the European Great Powers, 1879–1885. Information about the issue of a German edition was recorded in a TASS bulletin from Berlin in December 1940. Stalin wrote on the bulletin that it should be translated into Russian.¹⁰⁶ And so it was. In February 1941 Beria sent Stalin a three-volume translation of Windelband’s book.¹⁰⁷ This was for private use by Stalin but, again, there is no discernible trace of the volumes in the Russian archives.

Stalin was interested in Bismarck’s domestic as well as his foreign policy. His copy of volume 16 of the first edition of the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet Encyclopaedia), published in 1929, contains a heavily underlined section on the periodisation of the Bismarck era, which the editors divided into the struggle for German unification (1871–96), social reforms and the conflict between socialists and conservatives (1878–86) and Bismarck’s ‘Iron Chancellorship’ (1887–90).¹⁰⁸

Stalin’s interest in diplomacy was longstanding; it was one of the headings of the classification scheme that he devised for his library in 1925. In the Soviet system, foreign policy-making was a function of the Politburo and, as general-secretary, Stalin was involved in foreign policy decisions great and small. In September 1935, for example, he reacted strongly against a suggestion from his Foreign Commissariat that Soviet exports to Italy should be banned because of the growing Italo-Abyssinian crisis, which culminated with Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia a month later. According to Stalin:

The conflict is not only between Italy and Abyssinia, but also between Italy and France on one side, and England on the other. The old entente is no more. Instead, two ententes have emerged: the entente of Italy and France, on one side, and the entente of England and Germany, on the other. The more intense the tussle between them, the better for the USSR. We can sell bread to both so that they can fight. We don’t profit if one of them beats the other just now. We benefit if the fight is lengthier, without a quick victory for one or the other.¹⁰⁹

Books on international relations in Stalin’s library included a 1931 Russian translation of the diary of the British diplomat Viscount D’Abernon, who served in the Berlin embassy in the 1920s. Stalin does not appear to have read the diary itself but he did pay close attention to the book’s introduction, written by a leading Soviet diplomat and historian, Boris Shtein, and noted Shtein’s analysis of Britain’s policy of juggling support for France against Germany without driving the Germans into an alliance with Russia.¹¹⁰ In December 1940 Stalin was sent the ‘dummy’ of a Russian edition of Harold Nicolson’s classic Diplomacy, together with a note from the publisher seeking permission for a print run of 50,000 copies.¹¹¹ What caught Stalin’s eye in his copy of the published book was the preface by A. A. Troyanovsky, a former ambassador who taught at the Soviets’ Higher Diplomatic School. Stalin evidently did not like what Troyanovsky had to say about contemporary British foreign policy – basically, that it was anti-Soviet. This suggests that he read the book after the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 when there was an anti-Hitler coalition with Britain’s Winston Churchill. Stalin crossed through pages 20–25 of the book, with a view, perhaps, to its reissue with a more politically expedient preface.¹¹²

Stalin’s only extensive public statement on an aspect of diplomatic history was his 1934 critique of Engels’s ‘The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom’ (1890), prompted by the proposed inclusion of the article in a special issue of the party’s journal, Bol’shevik. Stalin was against republication because he thought it would confuse people’s thinking about the origins of the First World War, though he wasn’t against the article appearing in a future number of the same journal.

Engels thought Tsarist Russia’s predatory foreign policy was a function of its diplomacy, whereas Stalin believed it was driven by class interests and domestic pressures. Engels had exaggerated the importance of Russia’s striving to control Constantinople and the Black Sea straits and omitted the role of Anglo-German rivalries in precipitating the First World War. Politically, Stalin worried that Engels’s article lent credence to claims that the war with reactionary Tsarist Russia was not an imperialist war but a war of liberation and a struggle against Russian barbarism. In Stalin’s view, Tsarist Russia was no better or worse than any of the other great capitalist powers.¹¹³ Interestingly, Stalin’s article was reprinted by Bol’shevik in May 1941.

With the advent of the Second World War, Stalin became directly and heavily involved in the conduct of diplomacy. His interest in the writing of a Soviet history of diplomacy was one sign of his growing engagement with diplomatic affairs. Put in charge of that project was Vladimir Potemkin (1874–1946), a prominent Soviet diplomat of the 1920s and 1930s. Potemkin had an hour-long meeting with Stalin in May 1940, the same day the Politburo passed a resolution mandating production of the history.¹¹⁴ Potemkin sent Stalin a progress report in October which listed the names and topics of the historians who had been recruited to the project. It would be a two-volume Marxist history of diplomacy, wrote Potemkin, one based on original research and written for a broad popular audience. It would be adorned by maps and other illustrations.¹¹⁵

When the first volume of Istoriya Diplomatii was published in early 1941 – half a million copies of it – Stalin phoned Potemkin to personally congratulate him and his team.¹¹⁶ Publication of the second volume was disrupted by the outbreak of war in June 1941 and by the time publication resumed in 1945, the work had expanded into three volumes. Potemkin sent Stalin a copy of volume 3 in December 1945 but the second volume of the trilogy, subtitled ‘Diplomacy in New Times (1872–1919)’, is the only one now to be found in Stalin’s library.¹¹⁷ Stalin’s markings of the book, which were mostly informational, suggest that he read a good deal of it, though he didn’t pay much attention to the section on Bismarck’s foreign policy from 1885 to 1890, perhaps because the master of realpolitik was past his best by this time. Or maybe Stalin felt he knew enough about Bismarck already.¹¹⁸

In 1913 Stalin had declared that ‘a diplomat’s words must contradict his deeds – otherwise what sort of a diplomat is he? Words are one thing – deeds something entirely different. Fine words are a mask to cover shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.’¹¹⁹ Three decades later he had changed his tune. In an April 1941 meeting with the Japanese foreign minister, with whom he had just agreed a neutrality pact, Stalin said that he appreciated his visitor’s plain speaking: ‘It is well known that Napoleon’s Talleyrand said that speech was given to diplomats so that they could conceal their thoughts. We Russian Bolsheviks see things differently and think that in the diplomatic arena one should be sincere and honest.’¹²⁰ In a similar vein, Stalin told British foreign minister Anthony Eden, in December 1941, that he preferred ‘agreements’ to ‘declarations’ because ‘a declaration is algebra’ while ‘agreements are simple, practical arithmetic’. When Eden laughed, Stalin hastened to reassure him that he meant no disrespect for algebra, which he considered to be a fine science.¹²¹

In May 1942 Stalin sent Molotov to London to meet British premier Winston Churchill, as a follow-up to the discussions with Eden about the conclusion of an Anglo-Soviet wartime treaty of alliance. Stalin wanted to include a clause that committed the British to recognise the USSR’s borders at the time of the German attack in June 1941. The British baulked at such a proposal since a lot of this territory had been gained as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Molotov counselled rejection of the draft treaty as an ‘empty declaration’. Stalin disagreed: ‘We do not consider it an empty declaration. . . . It lacks the question of the security of frontiers, but this is not too bad perhaps, for it gives us a free hand. The question of frontiers . . . will be decided by force.’¹²²

‘The Pope,’ asked Stalin. ‘How many divisions has he got?’ The quote is apocryphal, but he reportedly said – with a smile on his face – something similar to Pierre Laval in May 1935, when the visiting French foreign minister suggested he should build some diplomatic bridges to the Catholic Church by signing a pact with the Vatican: ‘A pact? A pact with the Pope? No, not a chance! We only conclude pacts with those who have armies, and the Roman Pope, in so far as I know, doesn’t have an army.’¹²³

CAESARS AND TSARS

Stalin was aghast when Svetlana told him she wanted to study literature at university.

So you want to be one of those literary types! You want to be one of those Bohemians! They’re uneducated, the whole lot, and you want to be just like them. No, you’d better get a decent education – let it be history. Writers need social history, too. Study history. Then you can do what you want.

She took her father’s advice, and did not regret it, but later switched to literary studies.¹²⁴

Exhausted by the war, in October 1945 Stalin retreated to his dacha near Sochi on the Black Sea – the first of a series of long holidays he took in the postwar years. One of the first things he did was to invite two Georgian historians, Nikolai Berdzenishvili and Simon Dzhanshiya, to his dacha at Gagra to discuss their textbook history of Georgia.¹²⁵ When they arrived, Stalin was ready and waiting for them with a copy of their book in front of him. Incredibly, the conversation lasted four days and ranged far and wide: the origins of Georgia and its connections with the peoples of the Ancient East; the feudal era in Georgian history; the formation of Georgian society during the struggle against Tsarism; and the eighteenth-century monarchy of Heraclius II, who Stalin considered was a moderniser and state-builder.

Berdzenishvili wrote a near contemporary account of his encounter with the man he considered a genius.¹²⁶ He was bowled over by Stalin’s knowledge and erudition, wondering how he found the time to read so much about the Ancient East. He waxed lyrical about Stalin as both a Georgian and a Soviet patriot, and dutifully noted his preferences when it came to historians: ‘He likes Turaev and Pavlov and does not like Struve and Orbeli.’¹²⁷

Stalin had plenty of queries about the book but the discussion was respectful throughout. Indeed, both authors were awarded Stalin Prizes for History in 1947.

According to Berdzenishvili, Stalin said that while the history of Georgia should be a patriotic history, it ought to feature the strivings of Georgians for connections with the Russian people and it had to acknowledge the progressive historical role of Russia: Georgia was a European country that had returned to the European path of development only when it became part of Russia.

These comments of Stalin’s exemplified the Soviet concept of the ‘Friendship of the Peoples’, which originated in the mid-1930s but had developed strongly during the war – the idea that even in Tsarist times the Russian state and its core population of Russians had been staunch allies of non-Russian nationalities in their struggles for liberation, progress and modernity.¹²⁸

Among Stalin’s more general comments was that the study of history was a search for the truth about the past, a science based on evidence. He deplored those communists who liked to spout on about dialectical materialism and big-picture issues but made no reference to documentation. When Stalin came across Berdzenishvili in the corridor reading a newspaper, he asked him about the situation in the country. ‘Peaceful and calm,’ replied Berdzenishvili. ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Stalin, before smiling and walking way. ‘Where is the evidence?’¹²⁹

The discussion was not limited to Georgian history. Stalin reminisced about his years in the Bolshevik underground and also spoke about the war. Prone to national stereotyping, Stalin told his audience that Russians were sturdy, the English well nourished, Americans crude, Italians short in stature and the Germans weak from eating too much ersatz food. About Soviet Jews during the war, Stalin had this to say:

Among them there are proportionally fewer Heroes of the Soviet Union [the equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the Congressional Medal of Honor – GR]. They are more drawn to economic organisations, gathering around them and leaving military matters to others. No one will beat them to a warm and safe place. It has to be said that there are among them fearless warriors, but not many.¹³⁰

Stalin’s remark echoed the popular wartime prejudice that ‘the Jews are fighting the war from Tashkent’. In fact, Soviet Jews were as courageous and committed as any other section of the country’s population.¹³¹

Svetlana was convinced that he didn’t like her first husband, Grigory Morozov, because he was Jewish, and claimed he wasn’t happy that her eldest brother Yakov’s wife, Yulia, was also Jewish.¹³²

The extent to which Stalin was anti-Semitic remains contentious. Zhores Medvedev judged that Stalin was not so much personally anti-Semitic as politically hostile to Jewish nationalism, which he saw as a threat to the Soviet system, hence his purging of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee after the war.¹³³ Officially the Soviet state was opposed to all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, and Stalin made many public statements to that effect. In 1947 the Soviet Union voted in favour of partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and in 1948 established diplomatic relations with newly created Israel. In Georgia anti-Semitism was not as widespread as elsewhere in Tsarist Russia. Stalin was surrounded by Jewish officials or officials with Jewish wives and he continued to fete Jewish writers and artists such as Ilya Ehrenburg. Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s transport commissar and the highest-ranking Jew in his entourage, did not think he was anti-Semitic and recalled that Stalin proposed a toast to him at a reception for the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in September 1939.¹³⁴ On the other hand, there is little doubt that Stalin used or acquiesced in anti-Semitism in order to promote his anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s.¹³⁵ Among Stalin’s other prejudices was anti-homosexuality and in 1934 sex between men was outlawed.

Witness to Stalin’s discussions with the Georgian historians was the first secretary of Georgia’s communist party, Kandid Charkviani. It was he who sent Stalin a copy of the textbook. In an interview many years later, Charkviani was asked if Stalin’s contributions to the discussion were ‘categorical’. No, he replied, it was a discussion, not a polemic. While Stalin considered his own views to be the most plausible, he did not insist on having the final word.

Charkviani recalled that as well as Georgian history, they talked about the history of Rome, especially General Sulla, who seized power in the first century BC but was renowned as much for his reforms as his repressions. Indeed, Sulla, quipped Stalin, had been able to rule Rome from his villa.¹³⁶

Stalin’s interest in the Roman Empire was no passing whim. He possessed a number of books on the classical history of Greece and Rome. As we know, among the books Stalin borrowed from but did not return to the Lenin Library were two volumes of Herodotus’s Histories.¹³⁷ In his copy of Alexander Svechin’s history of military strategy it is the Roman section that is the most marked.¹³⁸ Reading a translation of Viscount D’Abernon’s diary, he picked out from the book’s introduction Edward Gibbon’s aphorism that the Romans believed troops should fear their own officers more than the enemy.¹³⁹ At the 17th party congress in January 1934, Stalin used Roman history to mock Nazi racism:

It is well-known that ancient Rome looked upon the ancestors of the present-day Germans and French in the same way as the representatives of the ‘superior race’ now look upon the Slavonic tribes. It is well-known that ancient Rome treated them as an ‘inferior race’, as ‘barbarians’, destined to live in eternal subordination to the ‘superior race’. . . . Ancient Rome had some grounds for this, which cannot be said of the representatives of the ‘superior race’ today. . . . The upshot was that the non-Romans . . . united against the common enemy, hurled themselves against Rome, and bore her down with a crash. . . . What guarantee is there that the fascist literary politicians in Berlin will be more fortunate than the old and experienced conquerors in Rome?¹⁴⁰

Among Stalin’s ancient history books were three by Robert Vipper: Drevnyaya Evropa i Vostok (Ancient Europe and the East, 1923), Istoriya Gretsii v Klassicheskuyu Epokhu (Greece in the Classical Epoch, 1908) and Ocherki Istorii Rimskoi Imperii (Essays on the History of the Roman Empire, 1908).

Stalin liked Vipper’s book on ancient Europe so much that he wanted its first chapter on the Stone Age to be retitled ‘Prehistorical Times’ and added to a school textbook on ancient history.¹⁴¹ The chapter in Vipper’s book on Greece that captured Stalin’s attention was the one on Sparta and Athens. It was Sparta that interested Stalin: its mythical and historical origins; its strategic position and military power; the ‘spartan’ life of its citizens; the city-state’s authoritarian political structure; and its diplomatic manoeuvres during the various wars that it fought.¹⁴²

Vipper’s book on the Roman Empire was, as far as we know, the most heavily marked text in Stalin’s whole collection, nearly every one of its 389 pages having words and paragraphs underlined or margin-lined. Alas, these pometki are probably not Stalin’s. The markings are similar to but not quite the same as his. Absent are the brackets, numbered points and rubrics in the margin that would be expected if this detailed set of markings was Stalin’s. The few scattered words in the margins do not appear to be in his writing.¹⁴³ The best guess is that the book belonged originally to a student or a teacher or, even, a historian marking up an important secondary source. This doesn’t mean that Stalin didn’t read the book. Given his evident regard for Vipper’s work and his interest in the subject-matter, it is highly likely he did and may even have added some marks of his own.

Over what lines might Stalin’s eyes have lingered? The markings of the unknown reader focused on military and political history: Rome’s near defeat in the Second Punic War; the difference between Greek and Roman democracy; the structure of Roman political and military power; the fall of the Roman Republic; the seizures of power by Sulla and Julius Caesar; the overseas expansion of the empire; and the imperial slogan ‘better Caesar’s power than a free people’.¹⁴⁴

Roman history has been a rich repository of lessons for rulers throughout the ages, but, as a Marxist, Stalin would also have appreciated Vipper’s effort to tell the deeper story. Based on Vipper’s lectures at Moscow University in 1899, the book’s aim was to describe Roman polity and society and explain the class forces that drove the imperial expansion and the political crises that led to the Republic’s downfall. Economic and financial issues are addressed as much as the power plays and political manoeuvres of Rome’s rulers. Combining theme and chronology, events and processes, the general and the particular, was a feature of Vipper’s historical writings, as was his exploration of the material basis of politics and ideologies.¹⁴⁵

Vipper’s type of historical writing may well have been behind a seminal outburst by Stalin at a meeting of the Politburo in March 1934, occasioned by a discussion of the poor state of history teaching in Soviet schools. No formal record of Stalin’s remarks was kept but his sentiments were conveyed in a speech a few days later by the head of the party’s education and propaganda department, Alexei Stetsky. In school textbooks, Stalin complained, history was replaced by sociology and class struggle by periodisation and the classification of economic systems. Also unacceptable to him was that Russia’s history was reduced to that of revolutionary movements:

We cannot write such history! Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine. They rested on certain classes, expressed their moods and interests, but they acted, they were historical figures. While they were not our people, it is necessary to present the historical epoch, what happened, who ruled, what sort of government there was, the policies that were conducted and how events transpired.¹⁴⁶

A couple of weeks later, at a special Politburo session attended by a number of historians, people’s commissar for enlightenment Andrei Bubnov gave a report on the preparation of new textbooks. There is no stenographic record of the ensuing discussion but there are reliable eyewitness accounts of what Stalin said.

As he often did, Stalin strode around the meeting smoking his pipe, at one point picking up a textbook on the history of feudalism, saying: ‘I was asked by my son to explain what was written in this book. I had a look and I also couldn’t understand it.’ Soviet school history textbooks, said Stalin, were not fit for purpose:

They talk about the ‘epoch of feudalism’, the ‘epoch of industrial capitalism’, the ‘epoch of formations’ – all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, no names, no titles, no content. . . . We need textbooks with facts, events and names. History must be history. We need textbooks about the ancient world, the middle ages, modern times, the history of the USSR, the history of colonised and enslaved people.

Stalin also attacked the late Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868–1932), dean of Soviet historians in the 1920s, who favoured broad-themed sociological history and downplayed the role of personalities in shaping the course of events. He decried Russian oppression of the non-Russian peoples and criticised the work of Vipper, deriding Latin and Greek as ‘dead languages of no practical use whatsoever’. ‘Tsars, ministers, reformers, etc. . . . will never be taught again’, he predicted in 1927.¹⁴⁷ Ivan IV he vilified as a ‘hysterical despot’ and Peter the Great as ‘a cruel, egotistical, syphilitic tyrant’.¹⁴⁸

Stalin blamed Pokrovsky’s ‘un-Marxist’ approach to history for the sorry state of Soviet historiography. As an antidote, he proposed the translation and adaptation of French and German texts such as the works of Max Weber and Friedrich Schlosser on the ancient world. He also suggested the assembled historians should make use of a textbook by Vipper.¹⁴⁹ Stalin didn’t say which of Vipper’s many textbooks he had in mind but they might have included his 1902 textbook on ancient history, which was another of those books he borrowed from the Lenin Library but failed to return.¹⁵⁰

By the end of March the Politburo had resolved to establish groups of historians to work on new textbooks.¹⁵¹ Stalin’s preferred outcome to that process was signalled by the publication in May 1934 of a state decree ‘On the Teaching of Civic History in the Schools of the USSR’:

Instead of civic history being taught in a lively and engaging way, with an account of the most important events and facts in chronological order, and with sketches of historical figures, pupils are given abstract definitions of socio-economic formations that replace consecutive exposition with abstract sociological schemas.

The decisive condition for the lasting assimilation of a course of history is the maintenance of chronological sequence in the exposition of historical events, with due emphasis on memorisation by pupils of important facts, names and dates. Only such a course of history can provide pupils with the accessible, clear and concrete historical materials that will enable them to correctly analyse and summarise historical events and lead them to a Marxist understanding of history.¹⁵²

The history of the USSR was of most interest to Stalin, although the title of the proposed textbook was something of a misnomer since much of it would be devoted to the pre-revolutionary history of Tsarist Russia. Progress on the project was so slow and unsatisfactory that in January 1936 the party leadership decided to organise a public competition and invited submissions of various textbooks, in the first instance those on modern history and the history of the Soviet Union. To guide contestants, Pravda republished two sets of notes, jointly authored by Stalin, the late Kirov and party ideology chief Andrei Zhdanov, which commented on previously submitted outlines of proposed books. The main criticisms of the outline for a book on the history of the USSR were, first, that it was not a history of the Soviet Union and all its peoples but of ‘Great Russia’ and the Russians; second, it had not emphasised enough that internally Tsarism was a ‘prison of people’ and externally a reactionary ‘international gendarme’; and, third, the authors had ‘forgotten that Russian revolutionaries regarded themselves as disciples and followers of the noted leaders of bourgeois-revolutionary and Marxist thought in the West’.¹⁵³

It took a year to whittle down the many submissions on Soviet history to a shortlist of seven, none of which were adjudged popular and accessible enough. Eventually, a twelve-strong group headed by Andrei Shestakov (1877–1941), a Moscow-based agrarian historian, was awarded a second-class prize (worth 75,000 roubles). The result of the competition was announced in August 1937, just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution.¹⁵⁴ It meant that Shestakov’s book would become a designated secondary school text on the history of Russia and the USSR.¹⁵⁵

Millions of copies of the 223-page Kratkii Kurs Istorii SSSR (Short Course History of the USSR) were printed. Among its first recipients was Stalin’s eleven-year-old daughter, who was given an inscribed copy: ‘To Svetlana Stalina from J. Stalin 30/8/1937’. She appears to have read it attentively, paying particular attention to its many coloured maps, such as the one on the USSR that she used to trace the events of the Russian Civil War, including the role played by her father in the defence of Tsaritsyn.¹⁵⁶

Shestakov’s book was aimed at third- and fourth-grade pupils. Textbooks with similar approaches and themes were then produced for use by older pupils and university students.¹⁵⁷

Stalin was so heavily involved in the preparation of the Shestakov book that Russian historian Alexander Dubrovsky considers him not merely an editor but one of the book’s de facto authors.¹⁵⁸

When editing a maket (dummy) of the book, Stalin paid much attention to the sections on revolutionary Russia and the Soviet period.¹⁵⁹ As he habitually did, Stalin toned down and reduced the coverage and adulation of him and his life. Finding his date of birth in the book’s chronology of important historical events, he crossed it out and wrote beside it ‘Bastards!’¹⁶⁰ Left in by Stalin was this entry: ‘1870–1924 Life of the Genius Leader of the Proletariat – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’. The chronology ended with entries on the Kirov assassination of December 1934 and adoption of a new Soviet constitution in 1936.

Stalin’s most important changes were to the book’s treatment of Ivan IV (the Terrible) (1530–1584). He struck out a statement that Ivan had ordered the execution of all those living in Kazan following a siege of the city by his forces. Allowed to stand, however, was the sentence ‘Kazan was plundered and burnt’. Nor did he like the implications of the authors’ claim that Ivan wanted to expand Russia to the Baltic Sea to establish contact with the educated peoples of western Europe, so he excised the word ‘educated’. Stalin did approve of their view that Ivan had established the autonomous power of Tsarism by destroying the aristocratic boyars, but added that in so doing he had completed the task of forging a scattered collection of principalities into a single strong state that had been initiated by Ivan I in the fourteenth century.¹⁶¹ The chapter’s concluding verdict on Ivan IV was that under his rule the domain of Russia expanded exponentially and his ‘kingdom became one of the strongest states in the world’.¹⁶²

The dummy contained many illustrations, some of which Stalin didn’t like. A notable excision was Ilya Repin’s famous painting of Ivan the Terrible and his dying son – which alluded to the claim that he had been killed by his father following a family row. Instead, the book carried a photograph of Victor Vasnetsov’s 1897 painting of Ivan, which depicted a stern-looking but majestic Tsar.¹⁶³

After publication Shestakov was at pains to point out the book had been prepared with the direct participation of the central committee of the communist party.¹⁶⁴ Among the party leadership’s many contributions was a directive from Zhdanov that its authors needed to revise the manuscript in order to ‘strengthen throughout elements of Soviet patriotism and love for the socialist motherland’.¹⁶⁵ The end result was a stirring story of a thousand-year struggle by Russia and its Soviet successor to build a strong state to defend its population from outside incursions.

The dissemination of this new narrative of continuity in Russian and Soviet history was part of Stalin’s efforts to imbue the USSR with a patriotic as well as a communist identity. David Brandenberger labels this repositioning by Stalin ‘national bolshevism’, while for Erik van Ree it was a form of ‘revolutionary patriotism’. Stalin preferred the idea of ‘Soviet patriotism’ – the dual loyalty of citizens to the socialist system, which looked after their welfare, and to the state that protected them.

Stalin’s patriotism was far from being merely a political device to mobilise the population and strengthen support for the Soviet system: it was integral to his changing views of the Tsars and Russian history.

Decidedly negative was the view of Tsarism expounded in Stalin’s 1924 lecture on The Foundations of Leninism, where he characterised the Tsarist state as ‘the home of every kind of oppression – capitalist, colonial, militarist – in its most inhumane and barbarous form’. Tsarism was the ‘watchdog of imperialism’ in eastern Europe and the ‘agent of Western imperialism’ in Russia itself. Russian nationalism was aggressive and oppressive and Tsarist Russia was ‘the most faithful ally of Western imperialism in the partition of Turkey, Persia, China, etc.’¹⁶⁶

While Stalin never ceased criticising the Tsars, his view of the state they had created shifted radically in the 1930s. During the course of a toast to the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, he said:

The Russian Tsars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interests of landowners. But they did one thing that was good – they amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state. And, for the first time, we, the Bolsheviks, have consolidated and strengthened that state as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of the landowners and the capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers, of all the peoples that make up that state. We have united the state in such a way that if any part were isolated from the common socialist state, it would not only inflict harm on the latter but would be unable to exist independently and would inevitably fall under foreign subjugation.¹⁶⁷

In that anniversary year there was a broad shift in Soviet discourse about Russia’s past. The revolution was celebrated as a radical historical break and its heroes lionised, but so, too, was Alexander Pushkin. That year was the cen—tenary of the poet’s death and it provided an opportunity to appropriate him and his works for the Soviet project. He was deemed a revolutionary writer both aesthetically and politically, a man of the people whose poems were accessible to all. ‘Only our time entirely and completely accepts Pushkin and Pushkin’s heritage’, editorialised Literaturnyi Sovremennik (Contemporary Literature). ‘Only now has Pushkin become truly close to millions of hearts. For the new masses conquering the heights of culture, Pushkin is an “eternal companion”.’ A 1931 piece by the former commissar for enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, was reprinted: ‘It is Pushkin who, among others, must become a teacher of the proletarians and peasants in the construction of their inner world. . . . Every grain that is contained in Pushkin’s treasury will yield a socialist rose or a socialist bunch of grapes in the life of every citizen.’¹⁶⁸ Also revived was the heroic reputation of Peter the Great in a biopic based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1934 novel. Peter was lauded as ‘a strong national figure who won territory through war and defended it through diplomacy’ and praised for ‘the achievement of raising Russia to the status of a great power in the European arena’.¹⁶⁹

REHABILITATING IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Although Robert Vipper was primarily a historian of the ancient world and of early Christianity, his most influential book was about Russian history – Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible). First published in 1922, Vipper’s book challenged the widely accepted view – in Russia and elsewhere – that Ivan IV was a bloodthirsty tyrant. Vipper’s Ivan was fearsome and menacing towards the Russian state’s domestic and foreign foes. Strengthening the monarchy was necessary to empower the Russian state and external threats and pressures motivated his harsh internal regime. His struggle for power against Russia’s barons was just, and his security apparatus – the much-maligned Oprichnina – as honourable as it was effective. He was also a great warlord and diplomat who had built Russia into one of the greatest states in the world.¹⁷⁰

Vipper was not alone in his rehabilitation of Ivan’s reputation. S. F. Platonov (1860–1933) mounted a similar defence in his 1923 book on Ivan the Terrible.¹⁷¹ We don’t know for certain if Stalin read either of these books, since neither is to be found among the remnants of his personal library, although it does contain a copy of Platonov’s 1924 history of Russia’s north and the colonisation of its coastal lands.¹⁷² It is not unreasonable to assume that Stalin read Vipper’s book and that it influenced his conversion to a positive view of Ivan the Terrible’s role in Russian history. The earliest hint that this was Stalin’s direction of travel was his editing the first volume of Istoriya Grazhdanskoi Voiny v SSSR (History of the Civil War in the USSR) in 1934. He deleted a reference to Ivan IV as the initiator of the Tsarist policy of aggressive, land-grabbing conquests. The Tsars remained repressive as a group but Ivan was nothing special in that regard.¹⁷³

This civil war history was Maxim Gorky’s project, the writer with whom Stalin maintained close relations. At the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934, Gorky made this somewhat ambiguous point which, depending on the folklore in question, could be construed as either anti-Vipper or anti-Pokrovsky:

Since olden times folklore has been in constant and quaint attendance on history. It has its own opinion regarding the actions of Louis XI and Ivan the Terrible and this opinion sharply diverges from the appraisal of history, written by specialists who were not greatly interested in the question as to what the combat between monarchs and feudal lords meant to the life of the toiling people.¹⁷⁴

Vipper was not a Marxist, or even a Bolshevik sympathiser, and neither he nor his views on Ivan the Terrible were welcomed by the Pokrovsky-led Soviet historical establishment. In an article on Ivan IV for the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia in 1933, Pokrovsky’s pupil M. V. Nechkina attacked Vipper’s book as a product of the counter-revolutionary intelligentsia and a veiled appeal for a fight against Bolshevism.¹⁷⁵ But the tide was already turning in Vipper’s favour. Following Stalin’s favourable reference to him during the history-teaching discussion and the publication of Shestakov’s book, Vipper’s textbook on the History of the Middle Ages was reprinted and placed on the syllabus of the higher party school for propagandists. In a 1938 article about Soviet historical writing on the ancient world, A. V. Mishulin commented that Vipper ‘unquestionably represented the peak of bourgeois science in ancient history. It would be utterly unjust if we failed to take his contributions to ancient history into consideration as we proceed to reconstruct the teaching of world history.’¹⁷⁶ In a 1939 volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia that dealt with the Oprichnina, both Vipper and Platonov received favourable mentions.¹⁷⁷ That same year saw the publication of the USSR history textbook for university students. Its section on the sixteenth century was written by S. V. Bakhrushin:

No-one denies the great and strong intellect of Ivan IV. . . . He was well-educated for his day . . . and possessed literary talent. . . . He was an outstanding strategist and a capable leader of military action. Ivan the Terrible correctly understood the requirements of domestic and foreign policy. . . . In many cases his cruel actions were provoked by the stubborn opposition of the great feudal lords to his endeavours and by outright treason on their part. . . . Ivan the Terrible recognised the necessity of creating a strong state and did not hesitate to take harsh measures.¹⁷⁸

A campaign to ‘restore the true image of Ivan IV in Russian history, which has been distorted by aristocratic and bourgeois historiography’, was launched by the party at the end of 1940.¹⁷⁹ As Kevin Platt points out, with the outbreak of war in June 1941, ‘the campaign to rehabilitate Ivan took on an overtly mobilizational character’.¹⁸⁰

The renowned cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) was commissioned to direct a film about Ivan IV, and Alexei Tolstoy (1883–1945) to write a play.

The director of Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October: 10 Days that Shook the World (1928), Eisenstein’s most recent film had been Alexander Nevsky (1938), a patriotic biopic of the thirteenth-century Russian prince who had defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle on the Ice on Lake Chudskoe. Tolstoy, whose origins were aristocratic, was distantly related to both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Primarily a science fiction writer and historical novelist, his Peter the Great book was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1941.¹⁸¹

This was the propitious background against which Vipper, who had emigrated to Latvia in the early 1920s, returned to Moscow in May 1941. Upon arrival he sent Stalin a telegram expressing fulsome thanks for helping him and his family’s joyful return to the land of socialism and pledging eternal loyalty to the country’s ‘great leader’.¹⁸² He was given a post at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History but was then evacuated to Tashkent, where he joined Bakhrushin and other historians. In 1942 he published a second edition of his Ivan Grozny. By Soviet standards it was a very small print run (15,000), possibly because of wartime paper shortages, but the book was well received. A third edition (5,000 copies) was published in 1944 and in 1947 it was issued in English.¹⁸³

Apart from the mandatory quotation of Lenin and Stalin, the main addition to the book’s wartime editions was a new chapter called ‘The Struggle Against Treason’, in which Vipper clarified that the traitors Ivan had put to death were real, not imagined, enemies of the state.¹⁸⁴

Bakhrushin developed his textbook chapter into a book and I. I. Smirnov published a short ‘scholarly-popular’ study of Ivan Groznyi in 1944.¹⁸⁵ In 1947 Bakhrushin wrote, ‘In the light of new research, Ivan the Terrible appears as a majestic and powerful figure, as one of the greatest statesmen in Russian history.’¹⁸⁶

While there are no signs of these books in Stalin’s archive, he would certainly have been sent copies and he would surely have read Pravda’s report of Vipper’s lecture to an audience in Moscow’s Kolonnyi Zal (Hall of Columns) in September 1943.

TASS reported that Vipper’s lecture on one of the most significant figures in Russian history had been a great success, noting that Ivan IV had created a powerful Muscovy state that played a crucial role in the gathering of the Russian lands and in developing close cultural, political and economic links with western Europe. The cause closest to Ivan’s heart, however, was the Livonian War (1558–83), which, according to Vipper, was a war for the restoration of ancient Russian rights. Vipper also dealt with the common complaint that Ivan was a cruel tyrant. To understand his harsh actions, people needed to appreciate the depth of domestic opposition to his efforts to create a centralised state – opponents who had allied themselves with foreign enemies.

The comparisons with Stalin’s time were self-evident and Vipper had no need to spell them out. He did, however, conclude with one explicit parallel between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries: then, as now, there were Germans who believed the Russians were incapable of defending themselves and underestimated the deep patriotism of the Russian people.¹⁸⁷

A fortnight later, Vipper was elected a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and appointed to its Institute of History. In 1944 he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and in 1945 the Order of Lenin.

The aesthetic rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible proved to be more problematic than the historical. There were three parts to Tolstoy’s projected play, the first of which dealt with the formation of Ivan’s character, the second with affairs of state and the third with his ‘inglorious end’.¹⁸⁸ He started work in autumn 1941 and had finished part one by the following spring. Printed copies of the script for the first part started to circulate, including one that found its way to Stalin’s desk. It was quite short and Stalin made a few inconsequential marks, indicating that he had read it.¹⁸⁹ There was talk of Tolstoy being awarded a second Stalin Prize but the party leadership didn’t like the portrayal of Ivan. At the end of April 1942 the Moscow party boss, Alexander Shcherbakov, who was also chief of the Soviet Information Buro, wrote to Stalin recommending prohibition of the play in its current form.¹⁹⁰ Shcherbakov also composed a longer version of his note, laying out detailed criticism of Tolstoy’s work. Stalin’s direct input into this critique remains unknown but it can be taken as read that it reflected his views as well.

‘Ivan IV was an outstanding political figure of sixteenth-century Russia,’ wrote Shcherbakov. ‘He completed the establishment of a centralised Russian state . . . successfully crushing the resistance of representatives of the feudal order.’ Tolstoy’s ‘confused play’ had numerous historical inaccuracies and had failed ‘to rehabilitate the image of Ivan IV’. The main flaw was not showing Ivan as a major, talented political actor, the gatherer of the Russian state and an implacable foe of the feudal fragmentation of Rus’ and of the reactionary boyars.¹⁹¹

Undeterred by this criticism, Tolstoy rewrote part one and continued working on part two, utilising Vipper’s book, among others. He sent both parts to Stalin for review but does not seem to have received any response, though they were published in the November–December 1943 issue of the magazine Oktyabr’.¹⁹² Part one premiered in Moscow’s Malyi Teatr (Little Theatre) in October 1944 but the production was not considered a success so it was restaged, to great acclaim, in May 1945.¹⁹³ Part two was performed by the Moscow Arts Theatre in June 1946. The final part of the trilogy – on Ivan’s last years – remained unwritten, it seems.

Part one made it into print again in November 1944, when Stalin took a more active interest and marked a few passages from Ivan’s longer lines of dialogue, the most interesting being this:

They want to live in the old way, each sitting in a fiefdom with their own army, just like under the Tatar yoke. . . . They have no thought or responsibility for the Russian land. . . . Enemies of our state is what they are, and if we agreed to live the old way, Lithuania, Poland, Germans, Crimean Tatars and the Sultan would rush across the frontier and tear apart our bodies and souls. That is what the princes and boyars want – to destroy the Russian kingdom.¹⁹⁴

Tolstoy, who died in February 1945, did not live to see part two of his play performed or to collect his second, posthumously awarded, Stalin Prize in 1946.

Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin’s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan’s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like Ivan the Terrible, rather that to appreciate Stalin’s Russia you needed to know something about Russia’s past. Harriman, who spent a lot of time with Stalin during the war, saw no traces of a court like that of Ivan IV. In his view, Stalin was a popular war leader; he was the one who held the country together: ‘So I’d like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency – one of the historic occasions where one man made so much difference. This in no sense minimises my revulsion against his cruelties; but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other.’¹⁹⁵

Sergei Eisenstein’s film commission also ran into political trouble. At first, all went well. Stalin approved Eisenstein’s screenplay, commenting that ‘it did not work out badly. Com. Eisenstein has coped with his assignment. Ivan the Terrible, as a progressive force for his era, and the Oprichnina as his logical instrument, did not come out badly. The screenplay should be put into production as quickly as possible.’¹⁹⁶ Part one of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible premiered in January 1945, and in 1946 he, too, was awarded a Stalin Prize.¹⁹⁷

Unfortunately, Stalin did not like Eisenstein’s part two film and in March 1946 its screening was prohibited on grounds that it was historically and artistically flawed.¹⁹⁸ Stalin considered the film ‘a vile thing’, and explained why at a meeting of the central committee’s Orgburo in August 1946:

The man got completely distracted from the history. He depicted the Oprichniki as rotten scoundrels, degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan. Eisenstein didn’t realise that the troops of the Oprichnina were progressive troops. Ivan the Terrible relied on them to gather Russia into a single centralised state, against the feudal princes, who wanted to fragment and weaken it. Eisenstein has an old attitude toward the Oprichnina. The attitude of old historians towards the Oprichnina was crudely negative because they equated the repressions of Ivan the Terrible with the repressions of Nicholas II. . . . In our era there is a different view. . . . Eisenstein can’t help but know this because there is a literature to this effect, whereas he depicted degenerates of some kind. Ivan the Terrible was a man with a will and character, but in Eisenstein he’s a weak-willed Hamlet.¹⁹⁹

As leading Soviet artists, writers and scientists often did when they came under such attack, Eisenstein petitioned for a meeting to plead his case. Because Stalin was on a prolonged holiday by the Black Sea, a meeting with Eisenstein did not take place until February 1947. Also present in Stalin’s Kremlin office were Molotov, Zhdanov and N. K. Cherkasov, the film’s lead actor.²⁰⁰ After the meeting, Eisenstein and Cherkasov reported the conversation to the writer Boris Agapov, and it is his notes that constitute the only known record of their conversation with Stalin.

Stalin’s opening gambit was to ask Eisenstein if he had studied history. More or less, was the reply. ‘More or less? I also know a bit about history,’ said Stalin. ‘You have misrepresented the Oprichnina. The Oprichnina was a King’s army . . . a regular army, a progressive army. You have depicted the Oprichniki as the Ku Klux Klan. Your Tsar comes across as indecisive like Hamlet. Everybody tells him what to do and he doesn’t take any decision himself.’ Ivan, Stalin continued,

was a great and wise ruler. . . . His wisdom was to take a national point of view and not allow foreigners into the country, protecting it from foreign influences. . . . Peter I was also a great ruler but he was too liberal towards foreigners, he opened the gates to foreign influences and permitted the Germanisation of Russia. Catherine allowed it even more. . . . Was the court of Alexander I a Russian court? Was the court of Nicholas I a Russian court? They were German courts.

Stalin made the same point again later in the conversation: ‘Ivan Groznyi was a more nationalist Tsar, more far-sighted. He did not allow foreign influence into the country. Unlike Peter, who opened the gate to Europe and allowed in too many foreigners.’

On Ivan’s cruelty, Stalin had this to say:

Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. One can show this cruelty but it is also necessary to show why he had to be so cruel. One of his mistakes was not to finish off the five big feudal families. If he had destroyed these five boyar families there would not have even been a Time of Troubles. . . . But when Ivan Groznyi executed someone he felt sorry and prayed for a long time. God hindered him in this matter. . . . It was necessary to be decisive.

At this point Molotov interjected that historical events needed to be shown in their correct light, using the negative example of Demyan Bedny’s comic operetta, The Bogatyrs (1936), which had made fun of Russia’s conversion to Christianity. Stalin agreed: ‘Of course, we aren’t very good Christians, but we can’t deny the progressive role of Christianity at a certain stage. This event had a major significance because it meant the Russian state turning around to close ranks with the West, instead of orienting itself towards the East. . . . We can’t just toss out history.’²⁰¹

Eisenstein and Cherkasov were keen to get as much guidance as they could about how they should rework the film. They were given a few pointers but basically Stalin was happy to leave the matter in their artistic hands, insisting only that they be as historically accurate as possible. There was general agreement when Eisenstein suggested that it would be better not to hurry production of the film.²⁰² In the event, Eisenstein, who had been ill for some time, died of a heart attack in February 1948. The film remained unrevised and was not released until five years after Stalin’s death.

Do his remarks to Eisenstein and Cherkasov reveal, as Robert Tucker argued, that Stalin saw himself as a latter-day Tsar and modelled his terror on that of Ivan’s? Hardly. Stalin had plenty of reasons of his own for conducting the purges. More plausible is Maureen Perrie’s suggestion that rather than driving the Great Terror, the historical parallel with Ivan the Terrible’s regime provided retrospective justification for the brutal repressions of the 1930s.²⁰³ For Stalin, history was a guide, not a straitjacket. More often than not, it was the present that framed his view of the past and determined the use-value of history.

SCIENCE & SOCIETY

The immediate context for Stalin’s stance on Ivan the Terrible was the Zhdanovshchina – the campaign against western capitalist cultural influences launched in summer 1946. Primarily a domestic campaign, it was prompted in part by Stalin’s disquiet at the postwar deterioration of diplomatic relations with the west and his growing frustration with what he saw as western obstruction of his efforts to secure the just rewards of that costly Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Stalin was determined to expand Soviet and communist influence in Europe, aiming to create a reliable bulwark of communist-controlled or influenced governments in central and eastern Europe to act as a barrier to future German aggression against the Soviet Union. Stalin thought he could achieve this while continuing to collaborate with Britain and the United States. Western political leaders had other ideas. In March 1946 Churchill declared that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Behind that screen, all the ‘ancient states’ of central and eastern Europe were succumbing to communist totalitarian control. A year later, US President Harry Truman called for a global defence of the ‘free world’ by the United States and requested funding from Congress ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.

Party ideology chief Zhdanov fronted the anti-western cultural campaign but Stalin vetted and edited all his major statements on the matter, including this version of an August 1946 speech:

Some of our literary people have come to see themselves not as teachers but as pupils [and] . . . have slipped into a tone of servility and cringing before philistine foreign literature. Is such servility becoming of us Soviet patriots, who are building the Soviet system, which is a hundred times higher and better than any bourgeois system? Is it becoming of our vanguard Soviet literature . . . to cringe before the narrow-minded and philistine bourgeois literature of the west?²⁰⁴

When officials from the Soviet Writers’ Union went to see Stalin about some practical matters in May 1947, they found him preoccupied with the intelligentsia’s inadequate patriotic education: ‘if you take our middle intelligentsia – the scientific intelligentsia, professors and doctors – they don’t exactly have developed feelings of Soviet patriotism. They engage in an unjustified admiration of foreign culture. . . . This backward tradition began with Peter . . . there was much grovelling before foreigners, before shits.’²⁰⁵

It was not only artists who came under attack for servility to the west. In 1947 there was a public discussion of a book on the history of western philosophy by Georgy Alexandrov, who was head of the party’s propaganda department. That position did not save him from criticism and nor did the fact that his book had been awarded a Stalin Prize in 1946. He was accused of underestimating the Russian contribution to philosophy and of failing to emphasise Marxism’s ideological break with the western tradition. While Stalin was not involved in the public discussion he had voiced his views in private meetings and Zhdanov made it clear that it was the vozhd’ himself who had drawn attention to the book’s flaws. As a result of this controversy, Alexandrov lost his party post, though he was given an only somewhat less important new job as director of an Institute of Philosophy.²⁰⁶

Alexandrov’s 1940 book on the philosophical forerunners of Marxism features in Stalin’s library but the markings in it are not his.²⁰⁷ A piece by Alexandrov that Stalin did read was a co-authored article by him on the same topic that appeared in a 1939 volume of essays on dialectical and historical materialism. Marked by Stalin was the section on Feuerbach, including the citation of Marx’s famous thesis that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’²⁰⁸

In the natural sciences, the campaign against pernicious western influences took the form of so-called ‘honour courts’. The first victims were a biologist, Grigory Roskin, and a microbiologist, Nina Klyueva, who had developed a new method of cancer therapy using a single-celled microorganism, Trypanosoma cruzi. Their sin was to give a copy of the manuscript of their book on treatment methods to American medical colleagues. On Stalin’s initiative the government passed a resolution on the formation of honour courts to assess whether such actions were anti-patriotic. No criminal sanctions were imposed on the two scientists but their ‘trial’ in June 1947 was attended by the cream of the Soviet medical establishment as well as hundreds of other onlookers. A year later the central committee sent a secret circular to party members that recounted the affair and criticised ‘slavishness and servility before things foreign’ and warned against ‘kowtowing and servility before the bourgeois culture of the west’.²⁰⁹

The patriotic imperative was also evident in the so-called Lysenko affair. Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet biologist who specialised in plant science, believed acquired characteristics could be inherited and were hence influenced by environmental changes. This was contrary to Soviet geneticists who contended inheritance was strictly a function of genes and nothing to do with environmental influences or the scientific manipulation of nature. This longstanding debate between the two factions took a new turn in April 1948, when Andrei Zhdanov’s son Yury, who was in charge of the science section of the central committee, gave a lecture criticising Lysenko’s views. Lysenko complained to Stalin and the result was a public apology by Yury Zhdanov and official endorsement of his position via the publication in Pravda of proceedings from a conference of July–August 1948 that expounded Lysenko’s views and trounced those of his geneticist critics.

Politically astute, Lysenko couched his position in terms of ‘Soviet’ versus ‘western’ science, and of ‘materialist, progressive and patriotic’ biology versus ‘reactionary, scholastic and foreign’ biology. It was Lysenko’s patriotism that appealed to Stalin more than anything.²¹⁰

Stalin also supported Lysenko’s position because it chimed with his own voluntaristic brand of Marxism, notably the belief that the natural world could be radically transformed by active human intervention. In line with this modernist vision, the Soviet press announced in October 1948 ‘The Great Stalinist Plan to Transform Nature’, a project for the mass planting of trees and grasslands and the creation of 44,000 new ponds and reservoirs. ‘Capitalism’, editorialised Pravda, ‘is incapable not only of the planned transformation of nature but of preventing the predatory use of its riches.’²¹¹

There was a strong element of Russocentrism in Stalin’s postwar patriotic campaign, a trend that had begun to emerge during the war. When the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a new national anthem (to replace the communist ‘Internationale’), they organised a public competition. One submission deemed worthy of Stalin’s attention contained this pithy verse:

Since the Terrible Tsar, our state has been glorious

It bears the potent might of Peter.

The glory of Suvorov shines behind us

And the winds of Kutuzov’s glory blow.

As our forebears loved the Russian land,

So we, too, love the Soviet land.²¹²

It didn’t make the cut but the winning anthem did contain this key verse:

The unbreakable union of free republics

Has been joined for ever by Great Russia

Long live the united and mighty Soviet Union

Created by the will of the peoples

At a military reception in the Kremlin in May 1945, Stalin proposed a toast to the health of the Soviet people but ‘above all to the Russian people’:

I drink above all to the health of the Russian people because they are the most prominent of the nations that make up the Soviet Union . . . I drink to the health of the Russian people not only because they are the leading people but because they have common sense, social and political common sense, and endurance. Our government made not a few mistakes, we were in a desperate position in 1941–1942 . . . Another people would have said: go to hell, you have betrayed our hopes, we are organising another government. . . . But the Russian people didn’t do that . . . they showed unconditional trust in our government. . . . For the trust in our government shown by the Russian people we say a big thank you.²¹³

The 110th anniversary of Pushkin’s death was commemorated with as much fanfare as his centenary a decade earlier.²¹⁴ In September 1947 Stalin issued greetings to Moscow on the 800th anniversary of the city’s foundation:

The services which Moscow has rendered are not only that it thrice in the history of our country liberated her from foreign oppression – from the Mongol yoke, from the Polish–Lithuanian invasion, and from French incursion. The service Moscow rendered is primarily that it became the basis for uniting disunited Russia into a single state, with single government and a single leadership.²¹⁵

Stalin’s Russocentrism should not be overstated. As Jonathan Brunstedt has pointed out, in his February 1946 election speech, Stalin made no special mention of the wartime role of the Russian people. Instead, he emphasised that the war had demonstrated the strength of Soviet multinationalism and the unity of the peoples of the USSR. In 1947 he rejected a reference to the leading role of the Russian people in the draft of a newly proposed party programme. In his greetings to Moscow the city’s historical contribution to Russian statehood was counter-balanced by celebration of its role in Soviet socialist construction. The Russians most lauded by Stalin were the post-revolutionary generations. As Zhdanov put it in August 1946: ‘We are no longer the Russians we were before 1917. Our Russia (Rus’) is no longer the same . . . We have changed and have grown along with the great transformations that have radically altered the face of our country.’²¹⁶

The international status of Russian science was very much on Stalin’s mind after the war. In a 1946 book about the role of Russian scientists in the development of world science, he marked their contributions to fields such as electronic communications, atomic physics, seismology and magnetism.²¹⁷ In a 1948 journal article he highlighted claims concerning the Russian contribution to medical science.²¹⁸

Responding to a session of the Soviet Academy of Sciences devoted to the history of Russian science, a Pravda columnist claimed in January 1948 that ‘throughout its history, the Great Russian People have enriched national and world technology with outstanding discoveries and inventions’. A headline in Komsomol’skaya Pravda that same month proclaimed, ‘The Aeroplane Is a Russian Invention’. According to the author of this article:

It is impossible to find one area in which the Russian people have not blazed new paths. A. S. Popov invented radio. A. N. Lodygin created the incandescent bulb. I. I. Pozunov built the world’s first steam engine. The first locomotive, invented by the Cherepanovs, moved on Russian land. The serf Fedor Blinov flew over Russian land in a plane heavier than air, created by the genius Aleksandr Fedorovich Mozhaiskii, twenty-one years before the Wright Brothers.²¹⁹

When the centenary of Ivan Pavlov’s birth was celebrated in September 1949, the headline of Pravda’s front-page editorial was a ‘A Great Son of the Russian People’.²²⁰ Immortalised by his research on conditioned reflexes that gave rise to the concept of a Pavlovian response, the physiologist-cum-psychologist Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–1936) was in his time the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist. He was the first Russian awarded a Nobel Prize – for Medicine in 1904 – and, unlike many other eminent Tsarist-era scientists, he opted to stay in the country after the 1917 revolution. Although not a Bolshevik, his materialist scientific research methods were deemed compatible with Marxism and seen as far preferable to the introspection and subjectivism of Freudianism. While his approach was dominant among Soviet physiologists, and remained so after his death, there were sceptics and doubters who questioned some of Pavlov’s more mechanistic and reductionist research.

It’s not clear how much Stalin knew about Pavlov or his work. His library contained a copy of the Russian edition of Pavlov’s Twenty Years of Experience of the Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activities of Animals, but it is unmarked.²²¹ What we do know is that he agreed wholeheartedly with a long memo sent to him by Yury Zhdanov in September 1949 that criticised ‘anti-Pavlovian revisionism’ among Soviet physiologists and psychologists. Zhdanov, the chastened former critic of Lysenko, was by this time married to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (though not for very much longer). He wanted to ‘unmask’ the revisionists and restructure research and teaching institutes to ensure orthodox, patriotic scientists were in charge. To that end, he proposed to convene a scientific discussion meeting that would smoke out the western-influenced anti-Pavlov elements. Stalin agreed with this strategy and kindly offered some tactical advice:

It is necessary first of all to quietly gather together the supporters of Pavlov, to organise them, allocate roles and then convene the conference of physiologists . . . where you should engage the opposition in a general battle. Without this the cause may collapse. Remember: for complete success you need to beat the enemy for sure.²²²

A joint Academy of Sciences and Academy of Medical Sciences ‘Scientific Session on the Physiological Teachings of Academician I. P. Pavlov’ duly took place in June 1950. With more than a thousand people in attendance, the leading doubters were criticised and subsequently demoted and a true believer placed in charge of a new Pavlov Institute of Physiology. This proved to be a temporary victory since within a couple of years of Stalin’s death the status quo ante had been restored. Zhdanov’s central committee Science Council was abolished and party interference in strictly scientific matters became frowned upon. Pavlovianism remained dominant but its critics recovered their place and status within the Academy.

Stalin believed himself to be a master of dialectical materialism – the Marxist methodology for understanding all aspects of human existence, including the natural world. He knew his limits, however, and generally stuck to subjects such as history, politics, economics and philosophy. However, in 1950 he intervened in a debate about linguistics focused on the views of the Anglo-Georgian language historian and theorist Nikolai Marr (1865–1934).

Marr specialised in the languages of the Caucasus but believed all the world’s languages were related and had a common root in four basic syllables – SAL, BER, ROSH, YON. After the revolution he adapted his theories to Marxist categories. All languages were class-based, he argued, and changed in accordance with transformations of the economic bases of societies. In compliance with the Marxist base–superstructure metaphor, language was categorised as an aspect of the cultural-ideological superstructure of a society which in turn rested on a class-based socio-economic mode of production. All aspects of the superstructure, including language, were shaped and determined by class relations and the dynamics of the economic base. Different classes spoke different languages and the language of homologous classes in different countries had more in common with each other than with their compatriots who belonged to a different class. Language, Marr insisted, was a class question, not an national or ethnic one.

In the 1920s Marr was centrally involved in discussions about the Latinisation of the Cyrillic alphabet and was consulted by Stalin’s staff about this matter.²²³ Latinisation was a project promoted by enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, as part of the Bolsheviks’ modernisation ethos. Cyrillic was deemed backward, bourgeois and chauvinistic, while the Latin alphabet was deemed modern and the core of a future world language. A number of minority, non-Cyrillic Soviet languages were Latinised in the 1920s but Stalin and the Politburo baulked when it came to Russian and vetoed the idea in a resolution passed in January 1930. Such a policy would have been hugely disruptive and ran counter to the emerging trend of resuscitating Russian history and culture as the foundation of a Soviet patriotism.²²⁴

Marr was selected to represent Soviet scientists at the 16th party congress in June 1930, telling delegates that he was dedicated to using all his ‘revolutionary creativity to be a warrior on the scientific front for the unequivocal general line of proletarian scientific theory’. He joined the party immediately after the congress and within a year had become a member of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Congress of Soviets.²²⁵ When Marr sought an audience with the dictator in 1932, he was politely turned down but Stalin said that he might be able to spare forty to fifty minutes at some point in the future.²²⁶ That meeting never took place because in October 1933 Marr had a debilitating stroke and in December 1934 he died.²²⁷

The Marrites were strongly entrenched in the Soviet linguistics establishment but had critics such as Victor Vinogradov (1894–1969) and Arnold Chikobava (1898–1985). Vinogradov was a Russianist literary and grammar scholar who believed languages were best studied as members of family groups such as the Indo-European – a traditionalist approach despised by Marr’s supporters. Chikobava, a Georgian linguist and philologist, also valorised the national-cultural character of different languages. Vinogradov’s study of the evolution of Russian literary naturalism was part of Stalin’s book collection, as was Chikobava’s Georgian text on ancient nominal stems in the Kartvelian language of the South Caucasus.²²⁸

Among Marr’s books in Stalin’s library was the edited volume Tristan and Isolde: From the Heroic Love of Feudal Europe to the Goddess of Matriarchal AfroEurAsia (1932), his Svan-Russian dictionary (1922) and a collection of essays about the language and the history of Abkhazia (1938).²²⁹

Like the Pavlovites, the Marrites tried to use the Lysenko affair to promote themselves and their theories as the epitome of patriotic Soviet linguistics. Meetings were held, articles were published and there were orchestrated attacks on Marr’s critics. Stalin’s involvement was precipitated by a December 1949 letter from Georgian communist leader Kandid Charkviani.²³⁰ Prompted, and probably drafted by Chikobava, it contained a detailed critique of Marr’s views, which Stalin read carefully. Marr was a vulgar not a dialectical materialist, wrote Charkviani. His theories were not and should not be the basis for a proper Marxist-Leninist analysis of the origins, relations and roles of language and languages. Marr was wrong to believe that all languages were class-based from their inception and that there was no such thing as a non-class language. During the Latinisation debates Marr had adopted a ‘cosmopolitan’ position that disrespected local languages. He thought the main goal of Soviet linguistics was to work towards a single world language, whereas Stalin had stated that during the transition to world socialism national languages would persist.

Included with Charkviani’s letter were writings by Chikobava containing further criticism of Marr’s views. Also in Stalin’s possession was a long Chikobava article about various theories of language, which concluded that while Marr had played a positive role in combatting idealist western language theorists (for example Ferdinand de Saussure), he had not provided a Marxist-Leninist resolution of the fundamental questions involved in the study of languages. Ironically, this 1941 article was published (in Russian) in the journal of the Georgian Academy of Sciences’ ‘N. Ya. Marr Institute for Language, History and Material Culture’.

Charkviani and Chikobava travelled to Moscow in April 1950, where they met Stalin at his dacha and had a long conversation about Marr. Stalin asked Chikobava to write an article for Pravda on Soviet linguistics. His article, ‘Some Problems of Soviet Linguistics’, published on 9 May, was extensively edited by Stalin. Stalin did his usual editorial job of sharpening and polishing the prose and inserted a few sentences of his own. In a section on the origins of language, Stalin added that Marr had rejected the idea that language

originated as means of communication by people, as an implement which arose from a persistent need for communication. Academician Marr forgets that people in the most ancient times lived and supported themselves in hordes, in groups and not individually. Academician Marr does not take into consideration the fact that it was just this circumstance that brought about their need for communicating, their need to have a common means of communication such as language.

Inserted into a section criticising Marr’s advocacy of artificial methods to quicken the formation of a world language, were these lines by Stalin:

Marxists understand this matter differently. They hold that the process of withering away of national languages and the formation of a single common world language will take place gradually, without any ‘artificial means’ invoked to ‘accelerate’ this process. The application of such ‘artificial means’ would mean the use of coercion against nations, and this Marxism cannot permit.

At the end of the article Stalin added this paragraph: ‘Marr’s theoretical formulation of a general linguistics contains serious mistakes. Without overcoming these mistakes, the growth and strengthening of a materialist linguistics is impossible. If ever criticism and self-criticism were needed, it is in just this area.’²³¹

Stalin’s interpolations presaged his own contribution to the linguistics debate, which proved to be a master class in clear thinking and common sense.

The arcane debate about linguistics staged by Pravda in May–June 1950 was an incredible spectacle, even by Soviet standards. Chikobava’s 7,000-word article was published as a double-page centre spread that spilled over onto another page. It contained plenty of familiar ideological rhetoric but it was also highly specialised, technical and supported by footnotes. Defenders of Marr responded in kind, as did other critics such as Vinogradov. Pravda published twelve contributions to the discussion before Stalin intervened.²³²

Before he weighed into the debate, Stalin reportedly read a lot of books about linguistics. ‘Stalin was such a quick reader, almost daily there was a new pile of books on linguistics in his study at Kuntsevo.’²³³ Among the materials he did consult were the entries on Yazyk (language), Yazykovedenie (linguistics), Yafet and Yafeticheskaya Teoriya (Japhetic theory) in volume 65 of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (1931). Named after one of Noah’s sons, Marr’s Japhetic theory postulated common origins for Caucasian languages and the Semitic languages of the Middle East. It was the cornerstone of his contention that all languages had a common root. Sections of these entries were quite extensively marked by Stalin and included the intriguing marginal comment ‘Yazyk – materiya dukha’ – language is a matter of spirit.²³⁴

Stalin’s intervention utilised one of his favourite devices: answering questions posed by Pravda.²³⁵ He began by undercutting Marr’s assumption – one shared by his critics – that language was part of the superstructure. Language, Stalin argued, was the product of the whole of society and its history. It was created by society and developed by hundreds of generations of people: ‘Language exists, language has been created precisely in order to serve society as a whole, as a means of intercourse between people . . . serving members of society equally irrespective of their class status.’

Next, he attacked the idea that languages were class-based. Languages were based on tribes and nationalities, not classes: ‘History shows that national languages are not class, but common languages, common to the members of each nation and constituting the single language of that nation. . . . Culture may be bourgeois or socialist, but language, as means of intercourse, is always a language common to the whole people and can serve both bourgeois and socialist culture.’ The mistake that some people made, said Stalin, was to assume that class struggle leads to the collapse of societies. But that would be self-destructive: ‘However sharp the class struggle may be, it cannot lead to the disintegration of society.’ The characteristic feature of languages, Stalin pointed out, was that they derive their use and power from grammar as well as a shared vocabulary: ‘Grammar is the outcome of a process of abstraction performed by the human mind over a long period of time; it is an indication of the tremendous achievement of thought.’

Marr was ‘a simplifier and vulgariser of Marxism’ who had ‘introduced into linguistics an immodest, boastful and arrogant tone’ and dismissed the compara-tive-historical study of language as ‘idealistic’. Yet it was clear that peoples such as the Slavs had a linguistic affinity that was nothing to do with his ‘ancestor’ language theory.

In a subsequent interview with Pravda, Stalin also criticised Marr’s view that thinking could be divorced from language: ‘Whatever thoughts that may arise in the mind of a man, they can arise and exist only on the basis of the language material, on the basis of language terminology and phrases.’

Stalin published five contributions on this matter in Pravda. In his final pronouncement he reiterated his view that eventually all languages would merge into a common world language. But that process would only take place after the global victory of socialism. In the meantime, hundreds of languages would continue to co-exist and there was no question of suppressing any of them or of asserting the superiority of any one language.

Boris Piotrovsky was among many Marr disciples who sensibly kept their heads down during the linguistics discussion. Doubtless that helped save his job as a deputy director of the Hermitage Museum. It didn’t save him from Stalin’s scorn. He ridiculed Piotrovsky’s contribution to a 1951 book on the history of ancient cultures and wrote ‘ha ha’ beside the editor’s claim that Piotrovsky had provided the first scientific account of the rise and fall of Armenia’s Urartu civilisation.²³⁶

Stalin’s articles on Marxism and linguistics were republished in all Soviet newspapers. They were read over the radio and reprinted as pamphlets with print runs in the millions. Linguistic programmes were revamped to include new courses on ‘Stalin’s Teaching about Language’. A wave of anti-Marrite discussions swept the country. Critical books and articles multiplied. One beneficiary of this counter-revolution, Vinogradov, was appointed head of a new Institute of Linguistics.

Worth quoting is Evgeny Dobrenko’s multi-metaphoric summary of these developments:

Stalin’s text is a discursive black hole that sucks in entire scholarly/scientific disciplines; they disintegrate at ever-increasing speed and produce more and more textual fragments. Put another way, one might compare this ever-expanding discourse originating from Stalin’s text to a progressive tumour that continually metastasizes to new organs and tissues. As a sacred object that gives birth to text and procreates discourse, this short text truly engenders oceans of literature.²³⁷

STALIN THE PLAGIARISER?

Various bets have been staked on which of Stalin’s writings were plagiarised from other authors. Trotsky’s claim that Lenin, not Stalin, was the author of Marxism and the National Question has already been dealt with. Stephen Kotkin writes that Stalin ‘plagiarized whole cloth’ his first major work, Anarchism or Socialism?, from a deceased Georgian railway worker-intellectual called Giorgi Teliya.²³⁸ The only cited evidence for this assertion is that in his 1907 obituary for Teliya, which was republished in his collected works, Stalin mentioned that his dead comrade had written a piece called ‘Anarchism and Social Democracy’.²³⁹ As Kotkin himself admits, ‘We shall never know how much of Teliya’s work Stalin borrowed or how much he may have sharpened it.’²⁴⁰ Or, indeed, if he made any use of it at all, except, perhaps, as an idea for his own series of articles.

Kotkin also repeats Roy Medvedev’s claim that Stalin’s 1924 lectures on The Foundations of Leninism – one of the key texts in the Stalinist canon – were heavily based on a manuscript by F. A. Ksenofontov on Lenin’s Doctrine of Revolution.²⁴¹ Again, this was a hare set running by Stalin himself when he allowed a private letter he had written to Ksenofontov in 1926 to be published in the ninth volume of his collected works.²⁴² Stalin’s purpose was to assert his authorship of the definition of Leninism as ‘the Marxism of the era of imperialism and of proletarian revolution’. Medvedev maintained that Stalin derived that definition from Ksenofontov, and he may be right. But Stalin’s elaboration of the definition in The Foundations of Leninism differs markedly from that of Ksenofontov. It is the broad strokes of the theory and practice of Bolshevism under Lenin’s leadership that interests Stalin, not the close textual analysis and careful formulations favoured by Ksenofontov.

Of several works by Ksenofontov that remain in Stalin’s book collection, the only text that he marked was On the Ideological and Tactical Foundations of Bolshevism (1928).²⁴³ Stalin seems to have skipped the first section of the book in which the author reprised his analysis of the nature of Leninism and nor did he show any interest in Ksenofontov’s history of Bolshevik strategy and tactics. Instead, Stalin homed in on his detailed reconstruction of Lenin’s thinking on the New Economic Policy and its relationship to socialist construction – a subject that was very much on his mind at the end of the 1920s, when NEP was in crisis and he was on the verge of breaking with that policy. As so often, Stalin’s reading interests reflected immediate and pressing political concerns.

Admittedly, complexity, depth and subtlety were not strengths of Stalin’s, nor was he an original thinker. His lifelong practice was to utilise other people’s ideas, formulations and information – that was why he read such a lot. His intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser. As Dobrenko put it: ‘Stalin never strove for novelty in his thinking but rather aimed at political expediency. In every case, the forcefulness of his thought is in its efficacy, not originality.’²⁴⁴

Ernst Fischer, the Austrian communist art historian who worked for the Comintern and lived in exile in Moscow from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, was among the many intellectuals smitten by Stalin. He ‘was the master of simplistic argument’, recalled Fischer, and intellectuals ‘succumbed’ to this simplisme because of his ability to reconcile ‘the critical reason of the thinker with the élan, the all or nothing, of the man of action’.²⁴⁵

MASTERS OF WAR

The interwar Red Army had at its disposal a talented and innovative group of military strategists: Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925), Boris Shaposhnikov (1882–1945), Alexander Svechin (1878–1938), Vladimir Triandafillov (1894–1931) and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937).²⁴⁶ Together they fostered a sophisticated discourse about the changing nature of modern warfare, the use of advanced military technology and the development of operational art. Especially important were the doctrines of ‘deep battle’ and ‘deep operations’, which entailed successive and sustained waves of combined arms forces (infantry, armour, airborne) penetrating the full depth of enemy defences and then the envelopment of enemy forces from the rear. These doctrines were similar to the contemporaneous German concept of Blitzkrieg but the Soviets were less tank centric and more inclined to use infantry and artillery for breakthrough operations. From 1936 these ideas were incorporated into successive editions of the Red Army’s Field Service Regulations, which guided the organisation and deployment of military forces and the conduct of combat operations. During the Second World War, Stalin was a diligent reader of these manuals and made numerous textual corrections to draft versions.²⁴⁷

Stalin’s interest in the details of military affairs was longstanding. His library included a copy of a Russian artillery journal dating from 1866, a 1911 history of the Russian army and fleet, and a photocopy of a description of the Madsen 20mm machine gun.²⁴⁸ Heavily marked by Stalin was a 1925 work on artillery – a translation of a book by the French general Frédéric-Georges Herr (1855–1932). Stalin was interested in the extent and organisation of artillery in modern armies, with the types and calibre of artillery and its potential range (up to 200km, according to Herr). He noted Herr’s comment that Germany was continuing to develop its armaments and had the lead when it came to chemical weapons. His attention was also drawn to the importance of technical education and the post-First World War British decision to establish a number of specialist military training schools.²⁴⁹ Ambassador Averell Harriman recalled that Stalin

had an enormous ability to absorb detail. . . . In our negotiations with him [about wartime military supplies from the US] we usually found him extremely well-informed. He had a masterly knowledge of the sort of equipment that was important to him. He knew the calibre of the guns he wanted, the weight of the tanks his roads and bridges would take, and the details of the type of metal he needed to build aircraft.²⁵⁰

Stalin was fond of talking about the impact on warfare of new technology and of hectoring his top commanders to break with their fixation on experiences during the Russian Civil War. Yet, judging by the books in his library, a favourite strategist was a nineteenth-century Tsarist General Staff officer called Genrikh Leer (1829–1904).

Leer was the closest Russian equivalent of Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the great Prussian strategic theorist. Leer taught at the Tsarist General Staff Academy from 1858 to 1898, the last ten years as its chief. He published a number of books on strategy, tactics and military history. Leer believed that military strategy should be taught as a science based on historical experience and as one that could derive from empirical data enduring rules and precepts about the conduct of war.²⁵¹

Stalin possessed four of Leer’s works: The Experience of Critical-Historical Research on the Laws of the Art of the Conduct of War (1869); Strategy (Part One: Main Operations) (1885); Combined Operations (1892); and The Method of Military Science (1894).²⁵²

All these books were stamped as belonging to the office library of the Defence Commissariat, which dates their earliest acquisition by Stalin to the mid-1930s, which was a period in which he read a number of military-related books, including the memoirs of Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891), who was chief of the Prussian General Staff, and General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s military supremo during the First World War. In Moltke’s memoirs he was drawn to the chapter on preparations for war, while in Ludendorff’s it was the stress on importance of popular support during wartime.²⁵³

An obscure figure in the twentieth century, Leer was quite well known in nineteenth-century Russia. His name came up in Soviet military theory debates in the 1920s, often coupled with that of Clausewitz. Stalin might have picked up on Leer from Svechin’s writings. Stalin read and marked the latter’s two-volume history of military art (from the Defence Commissariat library, too) and also had a copy of Svechin’s own book on strategy. Svechin disagreed with Leer’s scientific approach but agreed with him about the importance of the study of history. And it was military history that interested Stalin most.²⁵⁴

Apart from Svechin’s strategy book, which approached the subject conceptually rather than historically, the alternative to Leer’s writings would have been Clausewitz’s On War. Although Stalin also ‘borrowed’ a copy of a 1932 Russian translation of this classic text from the Defence Commissariat, he does not appear to have paid it much attention, except to read the publisher’s preface, which praised Clausewitz as a fine student of history and a master of the dialectical study of war. Stalin also marked the comment that lumped Leer and Svechin together as logicians and metaphysicians, compared to Clausewitz, who had liberated the theory of war from such ‘bourgeois’ methods.²⁵⁵

All four Leer books are heavily marked, three of them by the same hand, but it is not Stalin’s. The fourth book, Strategiya, was marked by multiple readers, one of whom might have been Stalin. According to Leer, the chief tasks of military art were twofold: to prepare the means of war and then to rationally deploy them. That required close attention to the economic, political and geographical character of the theatre of war as well as to its strictly military aspects. In the conduct of war the choice of strategic direction was all-important, as was the safeguarding of the forces and supplies tasked to carry out operations.

An underlined Leer passage that might well have stuck in his Stalin’s mind was that after his defeat by Napoleon at the battle of Borodino in 1812, Kutuzov faced a choice between saving his army and saving Moscow.²⁵⁶ Kutuzov chose the former and then conducted a harassing campaign against Napoleon’s forces when they retreated from Moscow. A similar dilemma confronted Stalin as Hitler’s armies approached Moscow in October 1941. In the event, he decided that to save his army he had to save Moscow so he remained in the capital and organised its defence. On 7 November 1941, he addressed troops parading through Red Square on their way to the front:

Remember the year 1918, when we celebrated the first anniversary of the October Revolution. Three-quarters of our country was . . . in the hands of foreign interventionists. The Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East were temporarily lost to us. We had no allies, we had no Red Army . . . there was a shortage of food, of armaments. . . . Fourteen states were pressing against our country. But we did not become despondent, we did not lose heart. In the fire of war we forged the Red Army and converted our country into a military camp. The spirit of the great Lenin animated us. . . . And what happened? We routed the interventionists, recovered our lost territory, and achieved victory.

Stalin returned to the patriotic theme in his peroration:

A great liberation mission has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission. . . . Let the manly images of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky [who defeated the Swedes], Dimitry Donskoy [who beat the Tartars], Kuz’ma Minin and Dimitry Pozharsky [who drove the Poles out of Moscow], Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov [the Russian hero generals of the Napoleonic Wars] – inspire you in this war. May the victorious banner of the great Lenin be your lodestar.²⁵⁷

Stalin’s favourite among Soviet strategic theorists was Boris Shaposhnikov, a former Tsarist officer who had joined the Red Army in 1918. During the civil war he helped plan Red Army operations and then served in various capacities, including as head of the Red Army Staff, commandant of the Frunze Military Academy and chief of the General Staff (1937–40, 1941–3). He got on well with Stalin personally and is said to be the only Soviet general the dictator addressed using the familiar second person singular, ty, as opposed to the more formal second person plural, vy (like ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ in French).²⁵⁸

Like Stalin, Shaposhnikov was an intellectual as a well as a practical man of action. Before the First World War he attended the Tsarist General Staff Academy. A keen student of history, he was conversant with several foreign languages, including French, German and Polish. His Mozg Armii (Brain of the Army) was a study of strategic lessons from the First World War focusing on the role of General Staffs. Shaposhnikov’s combination of grand strategy and critical organisational detail were also the hallmarks of Stalin’s military and political leadership. Systematic and admirably lucid, Shaposhnikov’s exposition in Mozg Armii was also a paragon of political orthodoxy, with many citations from the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, as well as western and Russian strategic theorists.²⁵⁹

The fundamental military lesson of the First World War, argued Shaposhnikov, was that General Staffs had prepared for a short, sharp war of annihilation but found themselves fighting a prolonged war of attrition. The lesson for future warfare was the necessity for prolonged economic and industrial mobilisation to fight protracted wars. Soviet preparations for the Second World War began even before Shaposhnikov had completed publication of Mozg Armii at the end of the 1920s. During the 1930s, defence’s share of the national budget increased from 10 per cent to 25 per cent. The Red Army grew from under a million to more than 4 million. By 1939, the Soviet Union had the largest and most extensively equipped army in the world and was annually producing 10,000 planes, 3,000 tanks, 17,000 artillery pieces and 114,000 machine guns.

In Mozg Armii, Shaposhnikov rehearsed at length the Clausewitzian commonplace that since war was a continuation of politics, war’s goals and overall direction were the prerogative of political leadership. On the one hand, General Staffs needed to understand the interrelations of domestic, foreign and military affairs while, on the other, political leaders required a good grasp of military matters. ‘In our times’, wrote Shaposhnikov, ‘the study and knowledge of war is essential for all state leaders.’²⁶⁰

One idea that Mozg Armii helped to popularise was that ‘mobilisation meant war’. Because of how modern armies must operate, mobilisation was, in effect, a declaration of war. When Russia’s armed forces were mobilised to support Serbia against Austria-Hungary during the July Crisis of 1914, it also meant war with the Hapsburg Empire’s German ally, whose Kaiser felt compelled to mobilise and attack not only Russia, but its ally, France.

When Germany attacked Poland in September 1939, Stalin kept the USSR out of the war by signing the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact. Indeed, the pact contained a secret protocol in which the Germans agreed that eastern Poland (i.e. western Belorussia and western Ukraine) and the Baltic States were in the Soviet sphere of influence. The quid pro quo was a guarantee of Soviet neutrality while Germany fought Poland’s British and French allies. Stalin’s deal with Hitler worked well for a while, but by June 1941 it was clear Hitler would soon attack the USSR. The question was: should the Red Army mobilise in anticipation of that attack? Stalin feared premature mobilisation would act as a catalyst for war, bringing forward the outbreak of hostilities. When Defence Commissar Semen Timoshenko and General Staff Chief Georgy Zhukov proposed precautionary mobilisation, Stalin reputedly responded: ‘So, you want to mobilise the country, raise our armies and send them to the western border? That means war! Do you not understand this?’²⁶¹

Stalin overruled his generals and forbade full mobilisation until German forces actually invaded the USSR. He was confident Soviet frontier defences would hold long enough for the Red Army to complete its counter-mobilisation. That proved to be a disastrous miscalculation when, on 22 June 1941, powerful German forces punched straight through Soviet frontier fortifications. By the end of 1941, the Wehrmacht had surrounded Leningrad, reached the outskirts of Moscow and penetrated deep into Ukraine and southern Russia. In these six months alone, the Red Army suffered a stunning 4 million casualties. Stalin sent Zhukov back to the front line and recalled Shaposhnikov as chief of the General Staff, giving him the opportunity to test the ideas of Mozg Armii in the crucible of total war.

One of the best-known war stories about Stalin, related by Khrushchev in his damning secret speech to the 20th party congress, is that he suffered a nervous collapse when the Germans invaded, and retreated to his dacha. It is a story reminiscent of pejorative tales about Ivan the Terrible skulking in his tent when confronted with military failure.

One oft-repeated version of this myth is that the shock and initial success of the German surprise attack on 22 June caused Stalin’s mental anguish. Another version claims that what disturbed Stalin was the collapse of the Red Army’s Western Front and the fall of the Belorussian capital, Minsk, at the end of June. There is no contemporaneous evidence to support either story. All the documentary evidence, notably Stalin’s Kremlin appointments diary, shows he remained in command of both himself and the situation.²⁶² Post hoc witness testimony claims otherwise but the hostile memoirs of Khrushchev’s supporters are contradicted by other witnesses. Stalin did, it is true, disappear to Blizhnyaya (not called ‘nearby’ for nothing) for thirty-six hours or so in early July, but he emerged to deliver a masterly radio broadcast. If Stalin did have a breakdown it was short-lived and he staged a miraculous recovery.

The common-sense explanation for Stalin’s brief absence from the Kremlin is that he went there to think things over and to compose his speech – his first public statement on the war and his first-ever radio broadcast.

Stalin was doubtless perturbed by what had happened – which was completely unexpected, given the enormous strength of the Red Army. He may well have wondered whether his generals were conspiring against him. On 1 July 1941, he removed General G. D. Pavlov as commander of the Western Front and had him arrested along with his chief of staff, his chief of communications and other senior members of his team. Like Tukhachevsky in 1937, Pavlov was falsely accused of being involved in an anti-Soviet conspiracy (both men were rehabilitated after Stalin’s death). But when Pavlov was sentenced to death it was not for treason but for cowardice, panic-mongering, criminal negligence and unauthorised retreats – a change in the charge sheet that signalled Stalin had chosen to discount the anti-Soviet conspiracy theory.

Another possibility is that when Stalin retreated to his dacha he did what he habitually did when he was there: he read a book. Not just any book, but Mikhail Bragin’s Polkovodets [Commander] Kutuzov, sent for printing on 14 June 1941 with a run of 50,000 (normal by Soviet standards). Its price was 2.5 roubles, plus 50 kopeks extra for a bound copy.²⁶³ The author was a young historian (b.1906) with a military background who had studied at the Frunze Military Academy. Major-General Levitsky’s preface to the book was written before Hitler’s attack but included an addendum that cited Molotov’s national radio address announcing the invasion on 22 June 1941: ‘When Napoleon invaded Russia our people responded with a patriotic war and he was defeated. Now Hitler has declared a new march on our country. The Red Army and the whole people will once again wage a patriotic war for the motherland, for honour and for freedom.’

Levitsky did not mention Stalin’s broadcast, which dates publication to the last week of June or thereabouts. Stalin would certainly have been sent a copy of the book straight away and it may have grabbed his attention. In his broadcast, Stalin made the same Hitler and Napoleon comparison: Napoleon’s army had been considered invincible but it had been smashed and so, too, would be Hitler’s.²⁶⁴

Kutuzov’s biography and the drama of his 1812 defeat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée was, of course, well known to Stalin. The restoration of Kutuzov’s status as a patriotic war hero began in the mid-1930s. By 1941, students at the higher party school were being taught a glowing account of Kutuzov’s role in the ‘people’s war’ of 1812. Stalin read the text of this lecture with avid interest, underlining lecturer E. N. Burdzhalov’s conclusion that ‘for Kutuzov, the overthrow of Napoleon was not important, it was his ejection from Russia.’

In 1942 the Red Army created two new medals for higher-ranking officers – the Orders of Kutuzov and Suvorov. At a meeting with the editors of Voennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought) and Voennyi Vestnik (Military Herald) three years later, Stalin complained about the Soviet officer corps’ narrow horizons, urging them to study the exploits of Russian military commanders such as Peter the Great, Kutuzov and Suvorov. He also criticised civilian historians who placed Kutuzov below Suvorov in the pantheon of military greats: ‘Kutuzov commanded bigger armies than Suvorov, dealt with more difficult political and strategic problems and successfully fought against stronger opponents.’²⁶⁵

Stalin certainly read Bragin’s book. His marks – underlinings and margin-linings – are scattered throughout its 270 pages.²⁶⁶ The marks were made with different coloured pencils, indicating that he dipped in and out of its pages. Two themes of Bragin’s were of particular interest to him. Firstly, what Kutuzov had learned from Suvorov: the maxim that the harder troops trained, the easier it would go for them in battle; the importance of the performance of ordinary front-line soldiers; and the need to avoid pointless offensives. Secondly, the parallels between 1812 and 1941. When Bragin quoted Napoleon – ‘I cannot rest on my success in Europe when half a million children are being born in Russia every year’ – Stalin underlined it. He noted, too, that when Napoleon invaded in June 1812 he did so without declaring war and had most of Europe at his disposal while Russia stood alone. Stalin also marked the section which noted how everyone expected Napoleon to win the initial battles. Kutuzov’s own account of his defeat of Napoleon, how he had drawn the French emperor into capturing Moscow and then worn Napoleon’s army down after it withdrew from the city, were double margin-lined by Stalin.

Bragin concluded by asserting Russia’s military prowess. After 1812 the victorious Russian army penetrated deep into Europe: ‘It entered Germany and seized Berlin, it entered France and took Paris and demonstrated the power of Russian arms to the whole world.’ When, at the end of the Second World War, Harriman said to Stalin, ‘Generalissimo, this must be a great satisfaction to you to be here in Berlin,’ he replied, ‘Tsar Alexander got to Paris.’²⁶⁷

Another book published just as Hitler invaded Russia was a biography of Suvorov by ‘K. Osipov’ – the pseudonym of the Soviet writer and literary critic Joseph Kuperman.²⁶⁸ Stalin’s copy has been lost but we can presume he read it, since in January 1942 he edited the draft of a review by the military historian Colonel Nikolai Podorozhny.²⁶⁹ Stalin changed the review’s title, ‘The Unsurpassed Master of War’, to ‘Suvorov’, but retained the phrase in the first paragraph. As might be expected, Stalin edited the piece with an eye to current events. He inserted a paragraph attributing to Suvorov the idea that if you can frighten the enemy and make them panic, you have won the battle without even setting eyes on them. Another addition cited Suvorov’s belief that victory was not won by capturing territory but by destroying enemy forces.

1. Stalin working in his Kremlin office in 1938.

2. Shushanika Manuchar’yants, Lenin’s and Stalin’s librarian (photo dating from the 1960s).

3. An early photo of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1917.

4. Stalin with his two youngest children, Vasily and Svetlana, in 1935.

5. Stalin’s handwritten library classification scheme, May 1925.

6. Title page of Nikolai Bukharin’s pamphlet about Lenin, Revolutsionnyi Teoretik, with Stalin’s ex-libris stamp.

7. Stalin’s numbering of some of Lenin’s arguments against political opponents in his polemic One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

8. In the margin of Karl Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism, Stalin notes: ‘With Kautsky, statics overwhelm dynamics. He does not understand that under the rule of the [proletariat] things must be different.’ At the bottom of the page he wrote ‘ha-ha’ beside Kautsky’s statement that it was desperation which drove the proletariat to take power in Paris and then lead the French Revolution at home and abroad.

9. On the front cover of Lenin, Conspiratorialism, and October (1924), Stalin wrote: ‘Tell Molotov that Trotsky lied to Il’ich [Lenin] about the course of the insurrection.’

10. Stalin proposed to change the name of Shestakov’s school textbook from Short Course History of the USSR to History of the USSR; A Short Course, but the original title was retained.

11. Stalin’s doodles on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s 1942 play Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible). The word uchitel’ (teacher) appears several times, as it does on other books in Stalin’s library.

12. Beside a paragraph of a 1946 article on contemporary military art that asserts the role of leadership and willpower in winning wars, Stalin wrote ‘not that’ and ‘the most important thing is knowledge of Marxism’.

13. Pages from a draft of the Short Course History of the CPSU containing a section on Stalin’s role in the Bolshevik underground in Transcaucasia. It is one of many such sections deleted by Stalin.

14. At the top of this page summarizing a discussion of the character of economic laws at the 1951 conference on the draft of the Political Economy textbook, Stalin wrote ‘what economic laws’ and in the margin ‘ha-ha-ha’, ‘hee-hee’ and ‘not so’.

Given the stupendous defeats and retreats of the Red Army during the first six months of the war, it is, perhaps, understandable that Stalin would want to delete a paragraph describing Suvorov as the ‘Marshal of the Advance’ – a reference to Suvorov’s slogan during the second Russo-Turkish war of 1789: ‘Only forward! Not a step back. Else death. Forward!’ He also deleted these stirring words of Podorozhny’s: ‘Not a step back! – demand the Soviet people of the Red Army. Beat the enemy on the spot, overrun them and smash their forces, chase them “day and night until they are destroyed” – this Suvorov maxim is as apt today as it was 150 years ago.’ But the words may have stuck in his mind because, a few months later, as the Germans advanced on Stalingrad, Stalin issued his most famous of wartime decrees – Ni shagu nazad! (Not a Step Back): ‘This must now be our chief slogan. It is necessary to defend to the last drop of blood every position, every metre of Soviet territory.’

The bulk of the review remained untouched by Stalin, including the colonel’s recommendation for the book to be read by every Soviet commander. It may even have inspired Stalin to ask Osipov to author a version for ‘command staff’. In August 1942 Osipov submitted an 189-page typescript to Stalin, who edited it but only to tone down Osipov’s enthusiasm for Suvorov.²⁷⁰

Stalin had involved himself in Suvorov-related matters before. In June 1940 he reviewed a film script about Suvorov. The script was inadequate, wrote Stalin. It was tedious and insubstantial and depicted Suvorov as a ‘kindly old man who occasionally crows “Cock-a-doodle-do” and keeps repeating “Russian”, “Russian”.’ What the film should to do was show what was special about Suvorov’s military leadership: the identification and exploitation of enemy weaknesses; well-thought-out offensives; the ability to select and direct experienced but bold commanders; the willingness to promote by merit not seniority; the maintenance of iron discipline among the ranks of the armed forces.²⁷¹

Stalin’s criticisms did not impede production of the film, which premiered in January 1941. Its two directors – Mikhail Doller and Vsevolod Pudovkin – were awarded Stalin Prizes, as was the actor who played Suvorov, Nikolai Cherkasov.

In the 1940s Stalin made a number of notable general statements about war that distilled his reading of strategy and military history books and synthesised it with the practical experience of supreme command. At an April 1940 conference on the lessons of the recently concluded ‘Winter War’ with Finland, Stalin delivered a long speech in which he explained to his generals why the Red Army had suffered such high casualties. First, the Red Army had expected an easy war and had not been prepared for hard battles with the Finns. Second, the war showed the Red Army was not a ‘contemporary’ army. In contemporary warfare, artillery was the main thing, followed by masses of airplanes, tanks and mortars. A contemporary army was an attacking, mechanised army. It also needed an educated command staff as well as trained and disciplined soldiers capable of themselves taking the initiative.²⁷²

At the back of Stalin’s mind when making this speech might have been a recently read Tsarist-era history of Russia’s armed forces in which he noted the problems Peter the Great experienced when unsuccessfully trying to capture Finland during the Great Northern War against Sweden (1700–1721). Stalin loved statistics: Peter’s Finnish war had lasted twenty-one years and required the mobilisation of 1.7 million troops, 120,000 of whom had perished, while another 500,000 had deserted.²⁷³ The Red Army’s campaign in Finland in 1939–40 was equally disastrous, but it lasted only a few months and Stalin did defeat the Finns and capture territory deemed vital to the security of Leningrad, albeit at the cost of a quarter of a million Soviet casualties, including 70,000 dead.

Stalin returned to the theme of the Red Army as a contemporary army in a speech to 2,000 graduates of its staff academies on 5 May 1941. But this time Stalin stated that the Red Army had been transformed into a contemporary army – a mechanised and well-equipped army with the requisite amount of artillery, armour and air power. He also probed the reasons for Germany’s victory over France in summer 1940, arguing the Germans had reconstructed their armed forces and had avoided fighting a war on two fronts. The Germans had been victorious because they fought to liberate their country from the shackles of the Versailles Peace Treaty imposed on Germany by Britain and France in 1919. That success would falter if they transitioned to wars of conquest, which is what happened to Napoleon when he stopped fighting wars of liberation. Many people believed the German army was invincible, said Stalin. It wasn’t. There never was and never could be such an army.²⁷⁴

At the accompanying reception he proposed several toasts, including one recorded by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov: ‘Our policy of peace and security is at the same time a policy of preparation for war. There is no defence without offence. The army must be trained in a spirit of offensive action. We must prepare for war.’²⁷⁵

In his Red Army day order of February 1942, Stalin identified five ‘permanently operating factors’ that would determine the outcome of the war now that the advantage the Germans had gained from their surprise attack had passed: (1) stability of the rear; (2) morale of the army; (3) number and quality of divisions; (4) armaments; and (5) organisational ability of army leaders.²⁷⁶

Estimating the relative significance of the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad and the great Soviet–German armoured clash at Kursk, Stalin reflected in November 1943 that ‘while the battle of Stalingrad heralded the decline of the German-Fascist army’, he said, ‘The battle of Kursk confronted it with disaster.’²⁷⁷

In the annals of Soviet history 1944 became known as the year of the ‘ten great victories’ and in his November 1944 speech Stalin gave a masterly display of the narrative technique of military history when he structured an account of that year’s events around a sequential series of battles and operations that pushed the Germans out of the USSR.²⁷⁸

He returned to the theme of the role of objective factors in war in his election speech to Moscow’s voters in February 1946:

It would be wrong to think that such a historical victory could have been achieved without preliminary preparation by the whole country for active defence. It would be no less wrong to assume that such preparation could have been made in a short space of time, in a matter of three or four years. It would be still more wrong to assert that our victory was entirely due to the bravery of our troops. Without bravery it is, of course, impossible to achieve victory. But bravery alone is not enough to overpower an enemy who possesses a vast army . . . it was necessary to have fully up-to-date armaments.²⁷⁹

And at a private meeting in April 1947 Stalin distinguished ‘military science’ from ‘military art’:

To understand military science means to understand not only how to conduct war i.e. military art, but also to know the economy of a country, its potential, its weak and strong sides, and also how it is developing. To know the material and human resources, both your own and those of the enemy. Only by knowing . . . military science is it possible to count on the achievement of victory in war. . . . The former leaders of fascist Germany did not understand military science and were unable to administer the economy of their country.²⁸⁰