Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

CHAPTER 7

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE USSR

If there was anything Stalin loved as much as reading, it was editing. His red or blue pencil marks on documents were as familiar to Soviet officials as his face. The same is true for today’s scholars of the Stalin era. How he processed the paperwork that crossed his desk is fundamental to understanding his thinking and decision-making. Rare were the draft documents that passed by his editorial eye unaltered.

Stalin’s journalistic approach was the hallmark of his editorial style.¹ Filling in a party registration questionnaire in October 1921, he listed ‘journalist’ as one of his special skills.² His political life was founded on writing and editing agitational materials – leaflets, pamphlets, speeches, editorials, short articles – and it showed in the way that he cut, reorganised and sharpened texts he found unsatisfactory. The results were hardly scintillating but he was a highly competent editor and the texts that bore his name, or imprimatur, were invariably clear and accessible to their intended readers, whether party cadres, popular audiences, foreign officials or specialists. Supremely confident, Stalin was comfortable in his role as the Soviet Union’s editor-in-chief.³

Mostly, Stalin edited for clarity and accuracy. But sometimes he felt the need to grapple with substance, particularly if the text was of major political importance. Such was the case with the five key texts considered in this chapter: the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938); the interwar section of volume two of Istoriya Diplomatii (1941); the second edition of his short biography, Joseph Stalin (1947); the polemical booklet Falsifiers of History (1948); and a Soviet textbook on Political Economy (1954).

Stalin’s first foray into full-length book-editing was his involvement in the early stages of the multi-part History of the Civil War in the USSR, the first two volumes of which dealt with pre-revolutionary history and the 1917 revolution. The project was Maxim Gorky’s idea and the aim was to produce a popular and accessible history that would highlight the feats and exploits of the ordinary people who fought for the Bolsheviks.⁴ Stalin was a titular member of the editorial collective, which was headed by I. I. Mints, a specialist in civil war history. Mints later worked on the History of Diplomacy book (see below) and served on the government’s Commission for the History of the Great Patriotic War. Mints was Jewish and in the late 1940s fell foul of the anti-cosmopolitan purge of suspected Zionists and lost all his academic posts. But he managed to avoid falling victim to more extreme measures.

Extensive consultations and discussions took place with Stalin on the first two volumes of the civil war history. In 1934 Gorky sent him the draft of volume one, which the dictator then edited in some detail, marking hundreds of corrections. Mints recalled that ‘Stalin was pedantically interested in formal exactitude. He replaced “Piter” in one place with “Petrograd”, “February in the Countryside” as a chapter title (he thought it suggested a landscape) with “The February Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution”. . . . Grandiloquence was mandatory, too. “October Revolution” had to be replaced by “The Great October Revolution”. There were dozens of such corrections.’⁵

Stalin the pedant was also a stickler for correct dates, accurate captions and informative subheadings, as well as making liberal use of adjectival qualifiers such as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’. He insisted the book’s title should include the name of the country in which the civil war took place, i.e. the USSR.⁶ Stalin was pleased with the result and in summer 1935 he wrote to congratulate Mints and his team: ‘You’ve done your work well – the book reads like a novel.’⁷ Elaine MacKinnon, the author of an in-depth study of the early years of the project, agrees:

The first two volumes were definitely popular in form, with colourful illustrations, photographs, and a prose style that is more characteristic of fictional narratives than scientific treatises. The characterizations are simplistic and project in animated tone clear images of good and evil, positive and negative. The narratives read like fiction, with many short sentences and continual efforts to build up a sense of tension and drama in the unfolding of events. Enemies are clearly defined. The role of workers, soldiers, and peasants is highlighted, despite innumerable references to Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders.⁸

In a pre-publication puff piece for the first volume, Mints explained the editorial process to readers of the party journal Bol’shevik. He emphasised Stalin’s personal involvement in the project but gave no details. He did, however, relate numerous examples of changes to the draft made by an unnamed ‘Chief Editor’, such as amending ‘Russia – prison of the peoples’ to ‘Tsarist Russia – prison of the peoples’ and changing ‘October Revolution’ to ‘Great Proletarian Revolution’. The chief editor’s changes, concluded Mints, merited close attention: ‘All these corrections are a model of deep analysis, exceptional clarity and precise formulation.’⁹

KEEP IT SIMPLE: THE SHORT COURSE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION

The civil war book fulfilled Stalin’s desire for heroic history to inspire the Soviet masses, but in the mid-1930s he was focused on a more important editing project – one aimed at key party members and activists: a new history of the party itself: a book that would explain clearly and credibly the complicated and tumultuous history of the party, its divisions and schisms, and its denouement in the Great Terror. How had the party succeeded in its historic mission while incubating clusters of high-level traitors, spies, assassins and saboteurs? The book also needed to educate members in matters theoretical, equip them with knowledge and understanding to shield them from malign influences and enable them to correctly implement the party line.¹⁰

The Short History arose from Stalin’s dissatisfaction with extant textbook histories of the party which did not connect its history with that of the country or provide a Marxist explanation of internal factional struggles. Crucial was to depict the struggle against anti-Bolshevik tendencies as a principled struggle for Leninism and as a battle that stopped the party from degenerating into a reformist, social-democratic organisation.

Appended to this memorandum of Stalin’s, which dates from spring 1937, was his schema for the periodisation of the new party history.¹¹ The writing task eventually fell to party propaganda chief Pyotr Pospelov and court historian Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky. Their final draft, presented to Stalin in spring 1938, cleaved closely to his preferred chapterisation but the boss was not happy with the results of their labour. As he later explained to his Politburo colleagues, eleven of the draft’s twelve chapters required fundamental revision, principally to strengthen its treatment of the party’s theoretical development – so necessary because of the ‘weakness of our cadres in the sphere of theory’.¹²

When the Short Course was published in September 1938, initially in Pravda and then as a book, Stalin was identified as the author of the section on dialectical and historical materialism, while the rest was attributed to an anonymous commission of the central committee. After the Second World War, Stalin was credited as author of the whole book and it was earmarked for publication as volume 15 of his collected works. As the prime editor of Pospelov and Yaroslavsky’s draft, he cut scores of pages, deleted hundreds of paragraphs and interpolated masses of his own text. He also made thousands of minor corrections. The Short Course was truly a history of the party as Stalin saw it and wanted it to be seen.

The end product of Stalin’s efforts was a biased, distorted and simplistic account of the party’s history, one manufactured by omission, elision and rhetorical tricks. Stalin was a past master at using such devices to present versions of events that were self-serving but credible. That doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in the essential truth of his version of the party’s history.

Pospelov and Yaroslavsky wrote reams of invective directed against Trotsky and other opponents of Stalin, which he deleted, substituting a pithy narrative thread that conveyed a sustained critique of the opposition while at the same time dimming the spotlight on them. It told a story of how misguided opponents became a bunch of careerists and opportunists and then resorted to treachery. When the anti-party and anti-Soviet line of these oppositionists was roundly rejected by the great majority of party members, they allied themselves with foreign capitalists and imperialists and engaged in terrorism and sabotage. Only in the mid-1930s did the extent of their ‘monstrous moral and political depravity’, of their ‘despicable villainy and treachery’ become fully apparent.

Numerous laudatory accounts of his own role in the history of the party were deleted by Stalin. He disappeared almost entirely from the party’s pre-revolutionary history, leaving Lenin as its one and only commanding figure. Stalin allowed himself to feature more heavily in the chapters dealing with the 1920s and 1930s, but given the centrality of his role in these years, it would have been difficult to do otherwise. Stalin also cut references to many other individuals, reducing Pospelov and Yaroslavsky’s text to an essentially institutional history of the party, its policies, factions and major actions. For Stalin that was the whole edifying point: to engage readers with the history of the party as a collective body, as an institution. He wanted his people to love the party, not Big Brother.

To supplement his editorial efforts, Stalin held a series of meetings in his Kremlin office to review each segment of the book before it was published by Pravda. In attendance were Molotov, Zhdanov and Pravda editor I. Ya. Rovinsky, as well as Yaroslavsky and Pospelov.¹³

Following publication, Stalin explained to a conference of leading party propagandists that the book’s main purpose was to educate cadres in matters of theory, specifically the laws of historical development. To illustrate the importance of theory, Stalin offered a rather dramatic example: ‘When we talk about the saboteurs, about the Trotskyists, you have to keep in mind that . . . not all of them were spies . . . among them were our people who went crazy. Why? They weren’t real Marxists, they were weak in theory.’¹⁴

The book was ‘addressed to our cadres’, said Stalin, ‘not to ordinary workers on the shop floor, nor to ordinary employees in institutions, but to cadres who Lenin described as professional revolutionaries. This book is addressed to our administrative cadres. They most of all need to go and work on their theory; after that everyone else can.’¹⁵

Stalin defended the book’s de-personalisation:

[Originally], this draft textbook was for the most part based on exemplary individuals – those who were the most heroic, those who escaped from exile and how many times they escaped, those who suffered in the name of the cause, etc., etc.

But should a textbook really be designed like that? Can we really use such a thing to train and educate our cadres? We ought to base our cadres’ training on ideas, on theory. . . . If we possess such knowledge, then we’ll have real cadres, but if people don’t possess this knowledge, they won’t be cadres – they’ll be just empty spaces.

What do exemplary individuals really give us? I don’t want to pit ideas and individuals against one another – sometimes it’s necessary to refer to individuals, but we should refer to them only as much as is really necessary. It is ideas that really matter, not individuals – ideas in a theoretical context.¹⁶

At the end of the conference Stalin talked delegates through some of the book’s historical content, making this general point about studying the past:

History should be truthful, it must be written as it was, without adding anything. What we have nowadays is history from 500 years ago being criticised from the point of view of the present. How can that be chronological? Religion had a positive significance in the time of Vladimir the Saint. At that time there was paganism, and Christianity was a step forward. Now our wise men say from the point of view of the new situation in the twentieth century that Vladimir was a scoundrel, the pagans were scoundrels and religion was vile i.e. they don’t want to evaluate events dialectically so that everything has its time and place.¹⁷

The Short Course addressed fundamental theory in its section on dialectical and historical materialism. Written by Stalin, it was the culmination and synthesis of his studies of Marxist philosophy. It was inserted into chapter four of the book, which dealt with the party’s history from 1908 to 1912, the pretext being that such a digression was necessary to understand the importance of Lenin’s major theoretical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.¹⁸

Stalin’s active engagement with philosophical issues was sporadic.¹⁹ His earliest major work, Anarchism or Socialism? (1906–7), was a fundamentalist defence of Marxist philosophy against criticisms levelled by various Russian anarchists. He didn’t return to such discourse until the Short Course. In between he read a few philosophy texts, kept abreast of intra-Marxist theoretical disputes and, if the Jan Sten story is to be believed, took a few tutorials in Hegelian dialectics. In 1930 he intervened in a Soviet philosophy debate that pitted so-called ‘mechanists’ against ‘dialecticians’, essentially a dispute about how much credit should be given to Hegel as a dialectician. Stalin sided with the mechanists, who argued that Hegelian dialectics were too formal, too abstract and too detached from political practice.

Anarchism or Socialism? was based primarily on the writings of Marx and Engels. ‘Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically flows,’ wrote Stalin. ‘This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.’

Marxism’s method was dialectical and its theory materialistic. Dialectics was based on the idea that in life change was constant. Marxist materialism asserted that when the material conditions of life changed so did people’s consciousness, but only after a time lag. Adroit political intervention during that lag could speed up the changes necessary to achieve the revolutionary transformation of both material life and consciousness.

In Stalin’s Marxist universe, history was inevitably moving in the direction of socialism because it was the only system in which the forces of economic development would be able to reach their full potential. Marxist struggles for socialism were not based on utopian aspirations but on knowledge of the objective dynamics of social development. ‘Proletarian socialism’, Stalin wrote, was a ‘logical deduction from dialectical materialism’. It was a ‘scientific socialism’.²⁰

Stalin railed against anarchist accusations that Marxist dialectics were not a method but a metaphysics. But it is hard not to conclude that the anarchists were right: what Stalin proposed first and foremost was an ontology, a general theory of reality, a description and analysis of what the world was actually like.

The ontological foundations of dialectical and historical materialism were stressed even more by Stalin in the Short Course. Reality is material, knowable and subject to definite laws, argued Stalin. This is true of both nature and the social world. Dialectics revealed that reality – human and physical – was interconnected, integrated and holistic, and in a state of constant movement and change.

Stalin’s ontology sought to make historical materialism a science of history based on the study of the laws of social development. Knowledge of these laws guided the party’s practice: ‘The prime task of historical science is to study and disclose the laws of production, the laws of development of the productive forces and of the relations of production, the laws of economic development of society.’

As he had in Anarchism or Socialism?, Stalin stepped back from the crude economic determinism implicit in his schema. Social ideas, theories, views and political institutions originated in the economic base of society but having arisen they acquired quite a lot of autonomy, including having a determining influence on material life. Indeed, Stalin’s emphasis on the relative autonomy of the social superstructure vis-à-vis its economic base was his distinctive contribution to Marxist philosophy.

Many philosophical holes can be picked in dialectical and historical materialism, but its attractiveness as a mode of thinking should not be underestimated. As the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm recalled in his memoirs:

What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. ‘Dialectical materialism’ provided, if not a ‘theory of everything’, then at least a ‘framework of everything’, linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of constant flux.²¹

Study of the Short Course was compulsory for virtually all educated Soviet citizens. Between 1938 and 1949 it went through 234 impressions, a total of 35.7 million copies, of which 27.5 million were in Russian, 6.4 million in the other languages of the Soviet Union and 1.8 million in foreign languages.²² Not until after Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin did the Short Course lose its official status as the definitive history of the party.

SHOW DON’T TELL: THE HISTORY OF DIPLOMACY

Stalin’s favourite editing weapon was deletion, his prime targets being quotation-mongering and excessive rhetoric. The goal was to streamline and de-clutter text, avoid repetition, and not lose sight of the wood by focusing on the trees.

Istoriya Diplomatii was commissioned by the Politburo in spring 1940. Its first volume, on the history of diplomacy from ancient times up to the Franco-Prussian war, was sent to the printers at the end of December 1940. The second volume would deal with the late nineteenth century, the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the origins of the Second World War. Stalin was sent the section on the politically tricky interwar years, the period when the Soviet Union became a central actor in the history of diplomacy.²³ The typescript was unsigned but the history’s titular editor, V. P. Potemkin, had previously indicated to Stalin that its authors would be Mints and A. M. Pankratova (1897–1957).²⁴

Stalin changed the title from ‘Diplomacy after the First World War and the Socialist Revolution in Russia’ to ‘Diplomacy in Contemporary Times (1919–1940)’. He also indicated that Russia’s exit from the First World War and the 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace treaty should be dealt with separately. Working through the text, he eliminated virtually all quotations from his and Lenin’s writings, thereby turning a propagandistic tract into an approximation of professional history, albeit of the highly partisan variety.

In many of his own articles and speeches, Stalin spelled out his political messages. Such didacticism he deemed unnecessary in this instance. Hence his deletion of many passages in this text that cast the imperialists in a bad light or read like special pleading on behalf of the Soviet government. The story itself was allowed to tell its tale of imperialist predation, hypocrisy and double-dealing on the one hand, and Soviet virtue on the other.

It turned out that these detailed edits were mostly a waste of Stalin’s time. Publication of volume two of Istoriya Diplomatii was disrupted by the outbreak of the Soviet–German war. When publication resumed in 1945, the project had metamorphosed into a much larger, three-volume work. Instead of one long chapter devoted to the interwar period, there were 700 pages in the third volume, mostly written by Mints and Pankratova, with Potemkin credited as the co-author of two chapters on 1938–9. The volume was subtitled ‘Diplomacy in the Period of the Preparation of the Second World War (1919–1939)’. There is no evidence that Stalin had a hand in editing this volume. Presumably, he was far too busy waging war.

But in one important respect, Stalin’s editing did endure: volume three contained hardly any Lenin or Stalin quotes. For the most part, it was a dry and dispassionate diplomatic history that only at the very end let rip a broadside against the ‘methods of bourgeois diplomacy’. This was written by another historian favourite of Stalin’s, E. V. Tarle (1874–1955), a specialist on Napoleon and the 1812 war. Among the aforesaid methods were aggression masquerading as defence; propaganda, disinformation and demagogy; threats and intimidation; and using the protection of weak states as a pretext for war. According to Tarle, Stalin asked him personally to write this chapter.²⁵

British historian Max Beloff’s highly critical review of volume three bemoaned its poor use of sources. Sources that suited the proffered interpretation were cited with no effort made to assess their accuracy and reliability, while the sources on Soviet foreign policy consisted entirely of official pronouncements.²⁶

LESS IS MORE: THE SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Stalin’s role during the Second World War was the culminating episode of his biography. Preparations for that ‘inevitable war’ drove his brutal push to modernise Russia. The Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was by far his greatest achievement. From near defeat in 1941 the USSR emerged as a mighty socialist state that controlled half of Europe and had the power to compete for global supremacy against the war’s other great victor, the United States.

The momentous nature of the war made it imperative to revise Stalin’s Short Biography, published by the Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL) in 1939. There was also a great deal of interest in his biography internationally. The Stalin cult had gone global. Stalin was Time Man of the Year in both 1939 and 1942. During the war, Stalin was inundated with questions and requests for interviews from foreign journalists. In January 1943 New York publishers Simon & Schuster wrote to Stalin suggesting that he write them a book about Soviet war and peace aims.²⁷ Soon after the war the Kremlin received enquiries from a British publisher wishing to issue a photographic biography of Stalin and from an American company that wanted to include him in its Biographical Encyclopedia of the World.²⁸

A redraft of the Short Biography was sent to Stalin for approval in late 1946. Stalin had affected disinterest in the first edition but was greatly interested this time, perhaps because the new version dealt with his military leadership. The draft landed on his desk while he was still revelling in his feats as supreme commander and jostling to snatch the limelight of victory from generals such as his deputy, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, whom he had recently dismissed as commander-in-chief of Soviet ground forces.

Stalin was not satisfied with the new edition and at the end of December he called in the editorial team for what David Brandenberger rightly calls ‘a collective dressing-down’.²⁹

The editorial team was headed by Agitprop chief Georgy Alexandrov, and included the historian Vasily Mochalov, who also played a key role in the production of Stalin’s collected works. Twelve months previously, Mochalov had been summoned to Stalin’s Kremlin office to discuss that project. As we learned in Chapter Two, he wrote a report of that memorable encounter, and he did the same for this meeting.

The need for a biography of Lenin that would teach people Marxism-Leninism was Stalin’s first comment. As to his own biography, it was full of mistakes. ‘I have all kinds of teachings,’ said Stalin sarcastically – about the war, communism, industrialisation, collectivisation, etc. ‘What are people supposed to do after reading this biography? Get down on their knees and pray to me?’ The biography should instil in people a love of the party. It should feature other party cadres. The chapter on the Great Patriotic War wasn’t bad, although it, too, needed to mention other prominent personalities.³⁰

Mochalov’s account tallies with that of Pravda editor P. N. Pospelov. ‘There is some idiocy in the biography draft,’ complained Stalin to Pospelov. ‘And it is Alexandrov who is responsible for this idiocy.’³¹ Pospelov took particular note of Stalin’s demand that it should reference leading figures who had worked with him in Baku, name those who had also taken up Lenin’s banner after his death, and mention the members of his Supreme Command during the war. Something should also be added about the role of women, said Stalin. The tone of the biography was ‘SRish’ i.e. too focused on him as a hero. To prove that point, he quoted the line, ‘No one in the world ever led such broad masses.’ And nowhere did the biography state what Stalin had told Emil Ludwig in 1931 – that he considered himself merely a pupil of Lenin’s.³²

Briefed by Stalin and armed with the boss’s editorial corrections, Alexandrov’s team quickly revised their draft text. The new edition of the biography was published by Pravda in February 1947 and then as a book with an initial print run of a million copies.

As was the case with the Short Course, Stalin toned down the adulation of himself. He inserted the names of many co-workers and made changes that emphasised his partnership with Lenin. He cut completely a section extolling his role as the leader of the international communist movement beloved by proletarians throughout the world. A substantial section was added on the role of women in the revolutionary movement and in building socialism. ‘Working women are the most oppressed of all the oppressed,’ Stalin is quoted as saying in one of his speeches.

One version of the draft ended with a stirring quote from Molotov: ‘The names of Lenin and Stalin are a bright light of hope in all corners of the world and a thundering call to struggle for peace and happiness of all peoples, a struggle for complete liberation from capitalism.’ This was deleted by Stalin, as were the concluding slogans: ‘Long live our dear and great Stalin!’; ‘Long live the great invincible banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!’ In the final product, these were replaced by a more restrained quote from Molotov that the USSR had been fortunate to have at its disposal the great Stalin during the war, who would now lead it forward in peacetime.³³

There were limits to Stalin’s modesty and he left in many cultish statements, especially in the chapter on the Great Patriotic War. Like its predecessor, the new edition was more hagiography than biography, but not a ridiculous one. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, extravagant claims about Stalin’s military genius had more than a modicum of credibility.³⁴

Among his insertions was this one:

Although he performed the task of leader of the party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation. When interviewed by the German writer, Emil Ludwig, Stalin paid glowing tribute to Lenin’s genius in transforming Russia, but of himself he simply said: ‘As for myself, I am merely a pupil of Lenin and my aim is to be a worthy pupil of his.’³⁵

While there was some theory in the Short Biography, there was no equivalent to the section on dialectical and historical materialism in the Short Course. Perhaps that’s what Alexandrov had in mind when he proposed a third edition in 1950 that would deal with Stalin’s postwar activities but also summarise his major theoretical writings. Outlines were devised and dummies prepared by Alexandrov and his staff, but nothing came of the proposal.³⁶

CONTROL THE NARRATIVE: FALSIFIERS OF HISTORY

Stalin’s only public comment on the Nazi–Soviet pact came in his radio broadcast a few days after the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941:

How could the Soviet Government have consented to conclude a non-aggression pact with such treacherous monsters as Hitler and Ribbentrop? Was this not a mistake on the part of the Soviet government? Of course not! A non-aggression pact is a pact of peace between two States. It was such a pact that Germany proposed to us in 1939. Could the Soviet Government have declined such a proposal? I think that not a single peace-loving state could decline a peace treaty with a neighbouring Power, even though the latter was headed by such monsters and cannibals as Hitler and Ribbentrop.³⁷

In private, he spoke at length about the pact at a Kremlin dinner in honour of Lord Beaverbrook and Averell Harriman, who travelled to Moscow in September 1941 to discuss British and American supplies to the Soviet Union. Captain H. H. Balfour, a member of the British delegation, recorded in his diary:

He explained plausibly how he had come to sign the Russo-German pact in 1939. . . . He saw war coming, and Russia must know where she stood. If he could not get an alliance with England, then he must not be left alone—isolated—only to be the victim of the victors when the war was over. Therefore, he had to make his pact with Germany.³⁸

Churchill provided further insight into Stalin’s calculations and thinking in his memoir-history of the Second World War:

At the Kremlin in August 1942 Stalin, in the early hours of the morning, gave me one aspect of the Soviet position. ‘We formed the impression,’ said Stalin, ‘that the British and French Governments were not resolved to go to war if Poland were attacked,’ but that they hoped the diplomatic line-up of Britain and France and Russia would deter Hitler. We were sure it would not. ‘How many divisions,’ Stalin had asked, ‘will France send against Germany on mobilisation?’ The answer was, ‘About a hundred.’ He then asked, ‘How many will England send?’ The answer was, ‘Two, and two more later.’ ‘Ah, two and two more later,’ Stalin had repeated. ‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘how many divisions we shall have to put on the Russian front if we go to war with Germany?’ There was a pause. ‘More than three hundred.’³⁹

In its defence of the pact, the third volume of Istoriya Diplomatii highlighted the role of western anti-appeasement critics and their prewar campaign for an alliance with the Soviet Union. The most prominent of these critics had been Churchill, who advocated a ‘grand alliance’ of Britain, France and the Soviet Union against Hitler. It was the failure of Churchill’s campaign and the collapse of the 1939 Anglo-Soviet-French triple alliance negotiations that had led to the Soviet–German non-aggression treaty.⁴⁰

For decades the key Soviet text on the Nazi–Soviet pact was Fal’sifikatory Istorii, a brochure issued by the Soviet Information Buro in response to the documentary collection Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–1941 (NSR), published by the US Department of State in January 1948.

NSR was a selection of diplomatic documents from captured German archives. It revealed the contacts between German and Soviet diplomats prior to the pact and the extensive co-operation between the two states after the agreement was signed. Most important, the book included the text of the non-aggression treaty’s secret additional protocol that divided Poland and the Baltic States into Soviet and German spheres of influence. Implicit in the selection and arrangement of the NSR documents was a narrative that Soviet negotiations with Britain and France for an anti-German front were a sham; far from being a desperate, last-minute gamble, the origins of the pact lay in a carefully prepared secret rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow.

Stalin couldn’t have been surprised by the Americans’ weaponising of the secret protocol. It had cropped up at the Nuremburg Trial in 1946 when the Nazis’ defence lawyers used it to show that if Germany was guilty of conspiracy to wage aggressive war then so, too, was the Soviet Union. Soviet jurists got the protocol excluded from evidence, but its text was discussed in open court by former German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had signed the pact in Moscow in August 1939. It was also leaked and published in the American press.⁴¹

The Soviet response to this American propaganda strike was remarkably speedy. Nazi–Soviet Relations was immediately translated into Russian by TASS and sent to Stalin.⁴² By 3 February, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky (the former prosecutorial star of the Moscow show trials) sent Stalin a detailed draft rebuttal prepared by a group of historians.⁴³ The pamphlet’s title was Otvet Klevetnikam (Reply to Slanderers), but Stalin changed this to Fal’sifikatory Istorii (Falsifiers of History), a phrase that he picked up from the Vyshinsky draft and decided to run with as a theme of the document. Stalin’s chosen subtitle was Istoricheskaya Spravka, which can be variously translated as historical information, reference, enquiry or survey. He also changed the subtitles of sections two and three of the brochure to reflect the idea that western policy was aimed at isolating the USSR. By the late 1940s, Europe was dividing and the cold war heating up. In Fulton, Missouri in March 1946, Churchill claimed that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’. To Stalin, however, it was the west once again striving to isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of Europe, as Hitler had done in the 1930s.

In modern parlance, the basic thrust of Falsifiers of History was that NSR was fake news, a selective spin on Nazi documents that did not correspond to the truth.

Falsifiers’ four parts were published separately by Pravda, on 10, 12, 15 and 17 February. Stalin was in such a hurry that the first three parts appeared in the newspaper before he had even finished editing part four. All four parts were then republished and promoted by Soviet embassies across the world. Two million copies of the Russian-language brochure containing the complete text were printed, as were hundreds of thousands in English and other languages.⁴⁴

Stalin edited the draft in detail and added about fifteen pages of his own text to the seventy-five pages of the Russian edition. Stalin’s additions were either handwritten or dictated to a member of his staff and then hand-corrected by him.⁴⁵ Many of his additions were rhetorical in character:

The slanderous claptrap that . . . the USSR should not have agreed to conclude a pact with the Germans can only be regarded as ridiculous. Why was it right for Poland . . . to conclude a non-aggression pact with the Germans in 1934, and not right for the Soviet Union. . . . Why was it right for Britain and France . . . to issue a joint declaration of non-aggression with the Germans in 1938, and not right for the Soviet Union. . . . Is it not a fact that of all the non-aggressive Great Powers in Europe, the Soviet Union was the last to conclude a pact with the Germans?⁴⁶

Falsifiers of History promulgated Moscow’s view of the Second World War’s origins and of Soviet–German relations after the signature of the non-aggression treaty in August 1939. Western culpability for the outbreak of war was its major theme. Western states had aided and abetted Nazi rearmament, appeased and encouraged Hitlerite aggression, and attempted to direct German expansion eastward, in the Soviet direction. By contrast, the Soviet Union strove to negotiate a great-power collective security front against Hitler, only to be thwarted by double-dealing Anglo-French appeasers who had no intention of allying themselves with the Soviet Union and indeed were all the while secretly negotiating with Berlin. Hence Moscow found itself faced with the unenviable choice of a temporary non-aggression pact with Berlin or being manoeuvred by the western powers into waging a war with Germany that the British and French did not want to fight themselves.

The USSR’s post-pact incorporation of Polish, Baltic, Finnish and Romanian territory was characterised as legitimate moves to build an ‘Eastern Front’ to defend against inevitable Nazi aggression against the Soviet Union – actions that pushed hundreds of miles to the west the line from which the Germans invaded Russia in summer 1941.

The booklet’s relatively frank account of Soviet policy during the period of the pact with Hitler was all Stalin’s doing. He wrote the first couple of pages of this section and framed Soviet policy in 1939–41 as the creation of an Eastern Front against German aggression – a narrative device he may well have derived from a speech of Churchill’s in October 1939, quoted with approval – in which his comrade-in-arms during the Second World War had said the Soviets were right to create such a front by invading eastern Poland to keep the Nazis out.⁴⁷

Later, in a passage that parodied Churchill’s iron curtain speech, Stalin wrote of Soviet expansion into the Baltic States and Romania:

In this way the formation of an ‘Eastern Front’ against Hitler aggression from the Baltic to the Black Sea was complete. The British and French ruling circles, who continued to abuse the USSR and call it an aggressor for creating an ‘Eastern Front’, evidently did not realise that the appearance of an ‘Eastern Front’ signified a radical turn in the development of the war – to the disfavour of the Hitler tyranny and to the favour of the victory of democracy.⁴⁸

Stalin’s next interpolation concerned the Soviet Union’s entry into what he called a ‘war of liberation’ against Hitler’s Germany. Here he contrasted President Harry Truman’s statement the day after the German invasion of the USSR with that of Churchill:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible. (Truman)

The Russian danger is our danger, and the danger of the United States . . . the cause of free men and free peoples fighting in every quarter of the globe. (Churchill)⁴⁹

Foreign Commissar Molotov’s trip to Berlin in November 1940 was one of the most contentious episodes of Soviet–German relations during the period of the pact. Molotov’s task was, if possible, to sign a new Nazi–Soviet pact with Hitler and Ribbentrop. In Falsifiers, Stalin presented it as a mission to ‘sound out’ and ‘probe’ Hitler’s intentions, ‘without having any intention of concluding an agreement of any kind with the Germans’.⁵⁰ This was only partly true. Stalin was willing to sign a new agreement if Soviet security could be guaranteed.⁵¹

The final words of the booklet were Stalin’s, too:

The falsifiers of history . . . have no respect for the facts – that is why they are dubbed falsifiers and slanderers. They prefer slander and calumny. But there is no reason to doubt that in the end these gentry will have to acknowledge a universally recognised truth – namely that slander and calumny perish, but the facts live on.⁵²

Fal’sifikatory Istorii (1948) is the closest we get to a Stalin memoir about his pact with Hitler. It was designed to shift the conversation about the war’s origins from the secret protocol to western appeasement of Hitler and to present a hard-headed defence of Soviet territorial expansion in 1939–1940. As a piece of propaganda, it had a glaring defect: it didn’t even mention, let alone address, the issue of the secret protocol. At Nuremberg the Soviets had derided the protocol as a fabrication designed to deflect from the Nazi conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Having adopted that stance, there was no question of backing away from it. Stalin didn’t do retractions.

TARGET THE AUDIENCE: THE TEXTBOOK ON POLITICAL ECONOMY

Socialist economics was the lifeblood of the Soviet system. The success or failure of Soviet socialism rested on its economic performance. Stalin devoted a lot of time to studying and dealing with economics problems. Many of his seminal speeches were devoted wholly or in part to economic questions. In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviets developed from scratch a socialist, planned economy but they didn’t theorise, generalise and codify their experience. As Ethan Pollock puts it, ‘There were no acceptable Soviet textbooks on the socialist economy or the transition to communism.’⁵³

This was a lacuna Stalin determined to fill, and in 1937 the central committee decreed the writing of a textbook on the political economy of both socialism and capitalism. In receipt of drafts from leading economists, Stalin summoned them to a meeting in the Kremlin in January 1941. The proposed textbook was impractical and overly theoretical, he told them. They had misconstrued the purpose of economic planning, which was, first, to ensure the independence of the economy under conditions of capitalist encirclement; second, to destroy the forces that could give rise to capitalism again; and, third, to deal with problems of disequilibrium in the economy. Stalin preferred practical observations of Soviet reality to abstract theories: ‘If you search for an answer in Marx, you’ll get off track. In the USSR you have a laboratory that has existed for more than twenty years. . . . You need to work with your own heads and not string together quotations.’ The draft was too propagandistic and not scientific enough. Required was a textbook that would ‘appeal to the mind’.⁵⁴

Work on the textbook was disrupted by the war and postwar progress was slow, not least because the economists were afraid of political missteps: they preferred to be told by Stalin what they should write. Not until late 1949 did Stalin have a new draft to consider. At a meeting with his economists in April 1950, he said it required serious correction in both tone and substance. He wanted a textbook that was more historical, more geared to less educated people, a book that would be ‘more approachable’, wherein ‘little by little the reader comes to understand the laws of economic development’. This was important because:

Our cadres need to know Marxist theory well. The first, older generation of Bolsheviks was well grounded. We memorised Capital, summarised, argued and tested one another. . . . The second generation was less prepared. People were busy with practical work and construction. They studied Marxism through brochures. The third generation has been raised on pamphlets and newspaper articles. They don’t have a deep understanding of Marxism. They must be given food that is easily digestible.

There were too ‘many babbling, empty and unnecessary words and many historical excursions’, he said. ‘I read 100 pages and crossed out 10 and could have crossed out even more. There shouldn’t be a single extra word in a textbook. The descriptions should be like polished sculpture. . . . The literary side of the textbook is poorly developed.’

At yet another meeting a month or so later, Stalin instructed his economists to ‘imagine the audience for whom you are writing. Don’t imagine beginners. Instead keep in mind people who have finished eighth to tenth grade.’ Further: ‘The textbook is intended for millions of people. It will be read and studied not only here, but all over the world. It will be read by Americans and Chinese, and it will be studied in all countries. You need to keep in mind a more qualified audience.’⁵⁵

Stalin did his usual detailed editing job and in January 1951 the economists presented him with another revised and rewritten draft. The saga continued with the circulation of nearly 250 copies of the draft textbook to economists and key party cadres. At a gathering to discuss this draft, some 110 speeches were made. Stalin pored over the hundreds of pages of the meeting’s transcripts.⁵⁶ Like many of his library books, they are littered with his underlinings, margin lines, crossed-through paragraphs, question marks, NBs (scores of them), yes, no, so, not so, nonsense, stupid, ha ha and numerous other markings.⁵⁷

In his first extended theoretical discourse on economic matters since the late 1920s, Stalin responded to what he read by composing some ‘Remarks on Economic Questions Connected with the November 1951 Discussion’. Some 3,000 copies of these remarks were circulated within the party but he resisted wider publication, saying it would undermine the authority of the textbook. His remarks prompted many comments and queries, including three letters from economists to which he chose to reply. Those replies, together with his original ‘Remarks’, were published by Pravda under the collective title Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.⁵⁸

Economic Problems was published in October 1952, on the eve of the 19th party congress. It was Stalin’s first significant ideological outing since Marxism and the Linguistic Question in 1950 and was of more interest to the average Soviet citizen than his critique of the long-dead Marr’s obscure theory of language. Like Stalin’s linguistics intervention, Economic Problems was a model of clarity, sometimes tediously so in its more technical sections on commodity production, the law of value and the abolition of the antithesis between mental and physical labour. However, Stalin disregarded his own advice to the economists that they should stick to practical observations and stay away from abstract theorising.

While the ageing dictator retained considerable intellectual powers, his comments showed the stagnation of his thinking. His argument that there are objective laws of political economy which operate independently of human will was essentially no different from the position he had staked out in Anarchism or Socialism? and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. According to Stalin, social action could constrain economic laws but it couldn’t change, override or abolish them, not even under socialism. Under capitalism the fundamental law of political economy was commodity production for profit; under socialism it was production for common welfare. The over-arching law of political economy was that the development of the forces of production determined history’s direction towards socialism because that was the only system in which they could achieve their full potential.

Stalin’s explanation for the continued existence of capitalism – a system whose private property relations were said to constrain the development of the productive forces – was that powerful interests blocked progress to socialism. That’s why political action was required to change the status quo. The problem with this argument was that it highlighted the importance in human affairs of politics, not economics.

The knots into which Stalin tied himself to defend his position are best illustrated by the section on the ‘Inevitability of War Between Capitalist Countries’, provoked by Eugen Varga’s contribution to the textbook discussion. Varga (1879–1964) was a Hungarian-born economist who for many years ran an influential Soviet think tank, the Institute of World Economy and World Politics.⁵⁹ He questioned the validity of ‘Lenin’s thesis on the inevitability of war between imperialist countries’, suggesting it no longer applied because of the evident damage to capitalist interests caused by two world wars and because US domination of the imperialist order precluded the possibility of a major inter-capitalist war.⁶⁰

Stalin did not name Varga but wrote vaguely of ‘some comrades’ who were wrong to question Lenin’s thesis, because, he averred, ‘profound forces’ continued to operate and that meant war was inevitable. Particular wars could be averted by the struggle for peace but not war in general. So, according to Stalin’s abstruse reasoning, war was inevitable but it might never happen. A more cogent hypothesis was that put forward in 1956 by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev: there was a tendency to war under capitalism but it was an eventuality that could be prevented by political struggle. Because of the strength of socialism and the forces for peace, said Khrushchev, war was no longer inevitable, which was a highly comforting thought in an age of nuclear weapons.

The statistician L. D. Yaroshenko (1896–1995) was another of Stalin’s targets. Yaroshenko argued that the prime task of economists in a socialist society was the scientific and technical development of the productive forces through the rational organisation of the whole economy.⁶¹ In Economic Problems, Stalin named and shamed Yaroshenko at length, insisting the political economy of socialism concerned the relations of production and their relationship to the productive forces. In other words, socialist political economy remained a science of the underlying laws of economic development, not a methodology for socialist planning.

For his ‘unmarxian’ sins, Yaroshenko was excluded from the party, arrested, imprisoned and then, after Stalin’s death, released, rehabilitated and readmitted. The Political Economy textbook published in 1954 reflected Stalin’s fundamentalist view, but post-Stalin Soviet economics was overwhelmingly focused on the task identified by Yaroshenko: how to improve planning to make socialism more economically productive and better able to meet the economic needs of state and society. Stalin’s focus on scientific economic laws became increasingly irrelevant in Soviet economic discourse, and his last writings little more than a historical curiosity.⁶²

Stalin’s legacy for the economic study of capitalism was just as woeful, as Richard B. Day explained:

He left behind a community of researchers whose thinking was frozen in analogies from the 1930s. The capitalist countries were entering one of the longest periods of economic growth in history; the Stalinist view held that they were languishing in a chronic depression. . . . Working class living standards would soon surpass anything imaginable in the 1930s; Stalinists predicted absolute impoverishment and unemployment for tens of millions. Capitalist countries were incorporating welfare-state measures into the fabric of modern life; Stalinist doctrine claimed that control of the state by the monopolies and their reactionary political agents inevitably produced a one-sided war economy.⁶³

All these examples of Stalin as editor show that he was a Bolshevik first and an intellectual second. In theory, he stood for truth and intellectual rigour. In practice, his beliefs were politically driven dogma. He extolled the rigours of historical science but put them aside when it was expedient to do so. He thought Marxist philosophy was both rational and empirically verifiable but its ontological foundations were beyond questioning. Marxism-Leninism was, he claimed, a creative approach to understanding the world, a guide to practice and an instrument of progressive change, but unwavering was his fundamentalist belief that socialism was inevitable as well as desirable.

Stalin’s unremitting pursuit of socialism and communism enabled his greatest achievements but at the cost of equally great misdeeds. Had he been more intellectual and less Bolshevik, he might have moderated his actions and achieved more at less cost to humanity.