Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Yet there was a core of intrinsic plausibility in Stalin’s quip. Born a Georgian, he retained habits and attitudes of his homeland and continued to cherish Georgian classical poetry. But he was also impressed by the rulers of the great Asian empires. He read avidly about Genghis Khan. His experience with Russia too had imprinted itself on his consciousness. He admired Russian nineteenth-century literature. He was proud of Russia’s past and present power. He resented the loss of those territories such as Sakhalin which had belonged to the Russian Empire. He liked to be among Russians as well as among Georgians. The likelihood is that his subjective identity was neither exclusively Russian nor exclusively Georgian but a fluid, elusive mixture of both. This is not an unusual condition. Many people who travel from country to country semi-assimilate themselves to new cultures without abandoning the culture of their upbringing. Stalin, moreover, was a socialist internationalist. As a Marxist he considered ideas of nationhood to be a temporary and contradictory phenomenon: they both enhanced and vitiated their societies. It is doubtful that Stalin felt a need to fix a national identity for himself in his own mind. Rather his priorities were focused upon ruling and transforming the USSR and securing his personal despotism.

  These priorities nudged him towards a change of policy on the national question regardless of the complexities of his own identity. Despite arresting individuals for Russian nationalism in the course of the First Five-Year Plan, he simultaneously ordered the media to avoid offending the national feelings of ordinary Russians and issued a confidential rebuke to the poet Demyan Bedny for poking fun at Russian popular proclivities.4 Stalin and Kaganovich, when ordering the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow in 1932, specified that this should be done without public announcement and at night: they did not want it getting about that a Georgian and a Jew had given the command.5 When Stalin’s official biography appeared in 1938, there was no reference to his Georgian background after the second sentence in the book.6

  He had reason to be worried about Russian popular resentment at being ruled by alien politicians. Although the NKVD — and previously the OGPU — seems to have reported little on this, Stalin had a lifelong sensitivity to such matters. A clandestine poster had an image of two bands of warriors facing each other across the river. One was a Jewish band led by Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev, while the other was Georgian and commanded by Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Enukidze. Below the image was the inscription: ‘And the Slavs fell into dispute about who was to rule in Old Russia.’7 Stalin indeed had several non-Russians in his entourage and not all of them were Georgians. Prominent among them in the early 1930s were Kaganovich (a Jew) and Mikoyan (an Armenian). Consequently Stalin remained wary of popular opinion. The battering of Russia’s peasantry, its Orthodox Church and its village ways of life induced vast hostility to the regime. What is more, the emphasis of official propaganda was on the importance of Stalin in the shaping of policies. This left no doubt about his personal responsibility. Peasants hated him, and no amount of propaganda could mollify their feelings.8

  By then the regime had abandoned many of its original objections to Russian traditions. The doyen of Soviet historical scholarship in the 1920s had been Mikhail Pokrovski, who had depicted the centuries before 1917 as an epoch of Russia’s oppression of other peoples in the empire. No emperor or general had been accorded any positive qualities. The entire social system was treated as a blockage to social progress. From the mid-1930s all this changed. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were lauded as initiators of administrative order, economic advance and external influence. The commanders Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov were hailed as rescuers of Russia and Europe from French tyranny. Whereas the Caucasian rebels had once been treated as heroes, historians began to stress that Russian Imperial rule conveyed much benefit to the borderlands. Russian scientific and cultural achievements were also highlighted. The chemist Mendeleev and the physiologist Ivan Pavlov (who died only in 1936) were said to be superior to their foreign counterparts. Russian nineteenth-century literary classics were produced in enormous print-runs, and the centenary of Alexander Pushkin’s death was celebrated with pomp in 1939. It was no longer acceptable to mock or denigrate Russia and the Russians in Stalin’s USSR.

  With Zhdanov and Kirov Stalin oversaw production of appropriate historical texts.9 The new orthodoxy was that the USSR was enhancing the best customs of Russian Imperial patriotism and enlightenment without reproducing the negative features of tsarism. Pride in country was to be fostered. Much of this was cynical propaganda to win favour with Russians. But it probably played on chords by then congenial to Stalin. After the October Revolution twentieth-anniversary parade in 1937 he spoke at a private dinner in Voroshilov’s Kremlin flat attended by a couple of dozen leading politicians and military commanders:10

  The Russian tsars did many bad things… But there’s one good thing they did: they created an immense state from here to Kamchatka. We’ve been bequeathed this state. And for the first time we, the Bolsheviks, have rendered this state cohesive and reinforced it as a unitary and indivisible state not in the interests of the great landowners and the capitalists but rather to the advantage of workers and of all the peoples that constitute this state.

  Stalin was an able actor and may not have believed a word of this. But the likelihood is that the statement with its peculiar mixture of Marxist– Leninist and Russian Imperial sentiments reflected his genuine opinion.

  He was also responding to the currents swirling in the political air. Individuals of Russian nationality tended to take the place of the defeated adversaries of the Stalin faction. Jews lost out. In the light of his continued association with Jewish friends (if indeed anyone could be called his friend), it would be difficult to call him an anti-semite; yet the fact remained that his principal enemies Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev — prominent members of Lenin’s Politburo — were Jewish by origin. Throughout the hierarchies of state administration the Russians were being promoted. Even in non-Russian Soviet republics they were securing posts. By contrast non-Russians seldom rose to high office outside areas where their nation did not constitute the majority of the local population. From the mid-1930s the Gulag system of camps contained ‘bourgeois nationalists’ of all national and ethnic groups except the Russians. The Russian language was honoured. It became compulsory in all schools and offices even though the Soviet republics were simultaneously allowed to go on teaching the local language too. The alphabets of other languages were altered. Latin and Arabic scripts gave way in most languages to ones based on the Cyrillic model.11

  Many suggested that Stalin, frustrated with merely distorting Marxism–Leninism, had effected its abandonment. The émigré Russian fascist leader Konstantin Rodzaevski, becoming convinced that Stalinism and fascism were identical, returned from Harbin to the USSR after the Second World War. (This was not Rodzaevski’s wisest move: he was shot on arrival in Moscow.)12 So was Stalin objectively a Russian nationalist even if he did not subjectively advocate such a posture? Undoubtedly from the mid-1930s he engineered the elevation of the Russians over the other nations of the Soviet Union. Russians were preferred for appointment to high public office. The Russian language was given pride of place in the school curriculum. Russian writers, commanders and even certain emperors were eulogised by the media. The conquest of those other nations by the forces of the Russian Empire was treated as a boon for their general development.

  The extolling of Russia and the Russians was accompanied by brutal maltreatment of several other peoples of the USSR. Ukrainians and Kazakhs believed that Stalin was inflicting genocide on them. Both suffered extremes of hardship through the violent collectivisation of agriculture imposed from Moscow. Kazakhs, a nomadic people, were forced to settle in kolkhozes. Ukrainians had always been an agricultural people. Abruptly their villages had been invaded by the OGPU and the 25,000-ers and, after the deportation of kulaks, the remainder of the inhabitants were forced into the collective farmin
g system. The Kazakhs and Ukrainians suffered worse than Russians in most areas of Russia. The reason was similar: the Kazakhs had a culture which had not yet accepted agriculture, much less collective farming; the Ukrainians included many households with a notable commitment to the benefits of private farms. Kazakhs and Ukrainians were bound to be hit deliberately hard by the collectivisation campaign started at the end of the 1920s.

  Initially there was an economic and cultural motivation to the Politburo’s treatment of both peoples rather than a national one. But once the campaign got under way, Stalin and his associates were alert to any possibility that ‘bourgeois nationalists’ might put themselves at the head of the rural resistance. Kazakh tribal and religious leaders were constantly persecuted. Repression was also applied in Ukraine not only against kulaks but also against priests, writers and scholars.

  Ukraine, however, continued to present Stalin with causes for political concern even though he was willing in 1932–3 to lower the grain-collection quotas across the republic. As collectivisation and deku-lakisation proceeded and material conditions worsened, peasants in their hundreds of thousands sought to flee to regions of the USSR where the food supply was more secure. Among the refugees were Ukrainians who, according to the OGPU, carried the bacillus of nationalism. The Politburo’s reaction, instigated by Stalin, was to instruct the Ukrainian communist authorities to close the Republic’s frontiers to human traffic from 22 January 1933. The same policy of closure was applied to the Kuban area of the north Caucasus where many Ukrainians had settled in earlier years: Stalin wanted to stop them from spreading nationalist ideas outside their villages.13 In the previous month, on 14 December 1932, the Politburo had decreed that the traditional party policy of recruiting mainly Ukrainian cadres to party and government in Ukraine and in Ukrainian-inhabited areas elsewhere had been applied much too mechanically. The alleged result was the penetration of the state by ‘bourgeois-nationalist elements’. The Politburo commanded that a much more rigorous political sieving of promotees should be undertaken.14

  Coming after the arrests and trials of Ukrainian cultural figures from the late 1920s,15 these measures were brutal and discriminatory; and although Stalin did not seek the extermination of all Ukrainians and Kazakhs, he certainly aimed to extirpate all opposition real and potential from among them. The ultimate objective, though, was to turn Ukraine and Kazakhstan into economically efficient Soviet republics. He therefore allowed both peoples to retain their culture, albeit in a much more restricted form than in the decade after the October Revolution. If the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic could be made an integral part of the USSR, it would constitute an economic model which would win admirers for communism in eastern Europe.16 Fertile Kazakhstan could also become a republic envied abroad, especially by Moslems. Collectivisation, dekulakisation, declericalisation and neglect of famine were appalling ways to raise Ukraine and Kazakhstan as models of the communist order, but they made a modicum of sense within the world-view of Stalin’s Marxism–Leninism.

  Not all interpretations of Stalin as a nationalist have him as a Russophile. Some think his indulgences to the Russians were a blind to his drive to enhance the prestige and conditions of the Georgian nation. Supposedly, far from being a Russian nationalist, he had maintained the patriotic enthusiasms of his youth. He had never approved Abkhazia’s separation from Georgia in the constitutional arrangements of 1921–2, despite delighting in taking his vacations on the Abkhazian coast.17 In 1931 he compelled his friend Nestor Lakoba to accept the incorporation of Abkhazia in the Georgian Soviet Republic. Most Georgians regarded Abkhazia as a province of historical Georgia and many of them felt grateful to Stalin for his action. Once incorporated, Abkhazia was exposed to a Georgianising cultural offensive, especially after the murder of Lakoba in December 1936.18 The Abkhaz alphabet was compulsorily changed to a system based on the Georgian script. Abkhaz-language schooling was restricted. Georgian officials were transferred to the Abkhazian party, government and police. Demographic restructuring took place as Mingrelians, living in western Georgia, were allotted housing and jobs in Abkhazia from 1937.19

  Stalin himself kept up his interest in the cultural pursuits of his youth. He fostered the publication of the old Georgian literary classics. He continued to read the great thirteen-century epic Knight in the Panther’s Skin by Shota Rustaveli. He permitted the reprinting of Alexander Qazbegi’s Patricide, the tale of mountain banditry which had inspired him as a boy. It was this cultural interest that had led Stalin to spend time reading and amending Shalva Nutsubidze’s anthology of Georgian poetry.20

  Yet these phenomena do not signify that Stalin was a Georgian nationalist. Such an interpretation would fit ill with his policies at the end of the Civil War, with the conquest of Georgia in 1921, with the persecution of the Georgian communist leadership in 1922 and above all with the attacks on Georgia’s peasants, priests, cultural figures and politicians from the late 1920s through to the late 1930s. The fact that many Georgians subsequently forgot about this does not alter this record. Stalin’s attitude can probably be best explained by reference to his long-known approach to the national question in general. Since Marxism and the National Question in 1913, his axiom had been that peoples without a vigorous press and literature should not be described as nations.21 His premise was that such peoples should be brought to a higher cultural level by being associated with adjacent sophisticated nations. This role could be fulfilled in Abkhazia by increasing the Georgian influence; and whereas he wanted to see the Ukrainians and Belorussians pulled higher by the introduction of Russian culture, his personal experience told him that Georgians, being non-Slavs, could not sensibly be handled this way: Georgian national consciousness was too strongly developed for this to be possible.

  Stalin elevated the status of Russians in the USSR and favoured some nations more than others; and he did this for a mixture of ideological and pragmatic reasons. The USSR was a state undergoing an economic and social transformation. Stalin had preconceptions about how to deal with the resultant problems. But he also had to react to circumstances that neither he nor anyone in his entourage had anticipated. Through the 1930s he found provisional solutions to the problems old and new.

  Yet Stalin was no more likely to amputate Marxism–Leninism than to cut off his own fingers. What he was doing was more like shaving his beard; for the essential ideology was left largely intact. Stalin was idiosyncratic in the aspects of Russian national identity he chose for approval. He declined to include aspects which had figured prominently in the ideology of most professed nationalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These had praised the religious faith of the Russian people, their rural customs and the simplicity and beauty of their villages. Russia’s peasantry — its unsophisticatedness, endurance and lack of regard for the rest of the world — had been at the core of historical nationalism. None of this appeared in a positive light in Stalin’s thinking. He dredged the Russian past for precedents for the communist preoccupation with state power, strong rulers, terror, industrialisation, towns and cities, secularism and organisational gigantism. There had been trends in this direction in some intellectual circles before 1917, but not in exactly the same form. The version of Russian nationalism which he allowed emerged largely from his own head.22

  There of course existed another ideology which hymned dictatorship, militarism, cities, gigantism and distrust of the West and derided peasant, village and Christianity. That ideology was Marxism–Leninism. What Stalin had done was to strip back the various versions of Russian national identity to a single, very peculiar one — and it was one which maximised the overlap with Marxist–Leninist notions as they had evolved since 1917. Russians were encouraged to enjoy a sense of nationhood but were severely dissuaded from exploring it. The authorities felt they knew what national identity was good for the Russian people, and punished attempts to offer alternatives.

  Russians, furthermore, were expected to be as much Soviet as Russian. Ju
st as the Romanov tsars had fostered popular allegiance to the Russian Empire more than to any national idea, so Stalin induced a mingling of multinational pride in the USSR more than unequivocal nationalism.23 He gave an impromptu speech at the dinner in Voroshilov’s flat on 7 November, and among other things he declared:24

  Old Russia has now been turned into the USSR where all peoples are equal. The country is strong through its own power, army, industry and collective farm agriculture. Among the equal states and countries in the USSR it is the Russian nation which is the most Soviet and the most revolutionary.

  He did not explain why Russians were more loyal than other nations to the October Revolution and the Soviet Union. But two factors stood out. One was that the Soviet Union was founded on a Russian territorial core. Another was that the Russian people were given advantages denied to others. Nevertheless Stalin did not want them turning into nationalists. He still feared the Russians. Consequently while other peoples had their own communist parties, he withheld this from the RSFSR. Their national feelings were to be channelled into a fusion of Soviet and Russian identities. By this means he would be able to enlist their support without letting the uncontrollable genie of nationalism into the open.