Stalin: A Biography

was the ultimate vicious circle. Stalin knew only what he wanted to know. His subordinates tried to tell him only what he wanted or what they wanted him to know. The Leader with the most penetrative power of any contemporary ruler was walled off from the modalities of the Soviet order at its lower levels. Master of all he surveyed, he saw only a small part of his country’s realities and controlled even less.

50. EMPEROR WORSHIP

Stalin sometimes claimed to be disconcerted by the extravagance of his cultic rituals. He asked for limits to the praise and muttered to his propagandists that they were overstepping them. In 1945, discussing plans for the first volume of his collected works, he proposed to restrict the print run to thirty thousand copies because of the paper shortage. Other participants in the meeting got him to agree to three hundred thousand copies, arguing that the public demand would be enormous.¹ Stalin also displayed caution a year later at a similar meeting to discuss the draft second edition of his biography. The flatteries irritated him:²

What should the reader do after reading this book? Get down on his knees and pray to me!… We don’t need idolaters… We already have the teaching of Marx and Lenin. No additional teachings are required… Nowhere is it said clearly that I am Lenin’s pupil… In fact I considered and still consider myself the pupil of Lenin.

The future of the Revolution, Marxism and the USSR had to be considered. ‘And what,’ Stalin exclaimed, ‘if I’m no longer around?… You won’t be inculcating love for the party [through this draft]… What’s going to happen when I’m not here?’³

Yet Stalin did not seriously impede the fanfares: either he was playing psychological games or he could no longer be bothered to keep tight control in the area of propaganda. In 1946 his collected works appeared in a first print run of half a million copies. A million copies of the revised biography had been published by the end of 1947 alone — and ten million copies of the Short Course in party history were put into press at the same time.⁴ The worship of Stalin had become a state industry (and Stalin himself had dropped his half-hearted attempt to restrict the print run).

There was harsh iconographic control. An episode from 1946 illustrates the punitive care taken with the image of the Leader. The artist V. Livanova had painted a poster of ‘9 May — A Worldwide Victory Holiday’ for the Moscow publishing house Art. In line with normal procedure, the editors checked it for visual merit and political reliability before submitting it to the censor I. N. Kleiner in Glavlit, the central censorship body. But things then went wrong. The editors did not wait for a decision but sent the poster to be printed in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. By the time copies of the poster were shipped back for distribution in the USSR, two errors had been discovered. One was that there were only fifteen banners representing the Soviet republics of the USSR instead of sixteen. The other related to Stalin: his marshal’s star had six points instead of five. Investigation proved that the errors had been made by Livanova herself and not by miscreants in Germany (as had been suspected). Glavlit itself got into trouble for having failed to exercise due care. Kleiner was sacked and the terrified leadership of Glavlit, trying to prove its loyalty, asked to be subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.⁵

Pernicious significance was attributed to these slight errors. Enemies of the Soviet order might be calling for the USSR’s dismemberment by reducing the number of official banners. Perhaps there was an implied call here for Ukraine to break away from the USSR into independence. As for the depiction of Stalin’s marshal’s star with six points, this might suggest a plot to represent him as a friend of international Jewry since the Star of David also had six points.⁶

The cult was the centre of the belief system of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism. While it had no creed, its devotees had to stick rigorously to formulaic terminology and imagery. Texts such as Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s The State and Revolution functioned like the Gospels, and the Short Course and Stalin’s official biography were equivalent to the Acts of the Apostles. The punctiliousness about words and pictures was reminiscent of Christian ecclesiastical traditions in the former Russian Empire — and Stalin, who had attended the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary till his twenty-first year, may well have been influenced, consciously or not, by his memory of the Orthodox Church’s unbending adherence to fixed rites, liturgy and images.⁷ Icon-painters represented sacred figures according to tightly prescribed rules. Perhaps this was the source for the extraordinarily detailed control over publicly available material on Stalin. If this indeed was the case, it must have reinforced the predisposition of the Marxist–Leninist doctrinaires to secure fidelity to the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin to root out any trace of heterodoxy. Medieval Christianity and vulgar Marxism were a potent mixture.

The established impersonality of Stalin’s imagery was trundled down a narrow-gauge track. No Politburo member was allowed a public profile that might deflect people from adoring the Leader. Veteran comrades-in-arms such as Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan came to notice only when they discharged particular duties: none of them was even mentioned in Nikolai Voznesenski’s The War Economy of the USSR; and there was no reference to them in the chapters added to the post-war editions of the Short Course and Stalin’s official biography.⁸

The Leader kept an aquiline watch over the products of Soviet propaganda. Even the Stalin Prize-winning novel The Young Guard by Alexander Fadeev incurred his displeasure. This was a best- seller depicting adolescent partisans working behind German lines in the war. Their bravery, determination and patriotism sounded a deep chord with readers and the book was especially popular with youth in the USSR. But Stalin had second thoughts. Unusually he had not read the text before the award of the prize. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled the Leader’s fury when he saw the rushes of the film made of the novel: ‘Here were youngsters left to their fate in a town seized by the Nazis. Where was the Komsomol organisation? Where was the party leadership?’⁹ The point for Stalin was that everyone should understand that victory in the war had been secured by the institutional framework and direction supplied by the hierarchies of state. Neither individuals nor even large social groups could be portrayed as operating autonomously. A codified version of historical reality was imposed. Anathema was pronounced upon any work showing Soviet citizens fighting effectively against the Wehrmacht without direct supervision by an administrative hierarchy stretching downwards from the Kremlin.

The war itself became something of an embarrassment to him. The Victory Day anniversary celebration was suspended after 1946 and not restored until after his death. Memoirs by generals, soldiers and civilians were banned. Stalin wanted to control, manipulate and canalise popular memory. The wartime reality could unsettle his plans for the post-war regime. Thoughts about how people coped and fought without reference to Stalin’s authority were dangerous.

The second edition of his official biography, presented to deafening fanfares in the media in 1947, added material on the Great Patriotic War and Stalin’s part in it. Amendments were also made to the existing chapters. Although the authors generally inflated the claims made about him, there was one exception. Whereas the first edition asserted that he had been arrested eight times and exiled seven times before 1914, the second reduced the numbers to seven and six respectively. But otherwise the new edition was an even more extravagant eulogy than before. The section on the Second World War hardly mentioned anyone but Stalin, and his one brief trip to the vicinity of the front was treated as crucial to the Red Army’s success. The narrative was little more than a list of battles. Government and army were mentioned. But drama, in so far as it existed in the chapters, was focused on decisions and inspiration provided by Stalin. The book entirely lacked an account of the difficulties of deliberation at Stavka or the contribution of other leaders and the people as a whole. The details of Stalin’s career in the war were overlooked; he was treated as the embodiment of the state and society in victory. Even more than before the Second World War he was an icon without personality. Stalin, the party, the Red Army and the USSR were represented as indistinguishable from each other.¹⁰

Stalin came ever closer to evicting Lenin from his primary status in the Soviet Union. There were indications of this in his preface to the first volume of his collected works. He expressed surprise that Lenin, who had developed the components of his telescoped Marxist theory of socialist revolution in 1905, had not fully divulged the fact until 1917.¹¹ Previously it had been incumbent on official propagandists to insist that Leninist policy had evolved in an unbroken line of positive change. Stalin by 1946 was suggesting that Lenin had missed a trick or two.