Stalin: A Biography

All the same he made plain his desire to counteract the fashion for admiration of foreign culture and science. When President Truman sent him some bottles of Coca-Cola, Stalin reacted angrily and ordered food scientist Mitrofan Lagidze to develop a superior pear-based fizzy drink to send in return. (For once some sympathy with Stalin is in order.)⁹ Praising only the achievements of the USSR, Stalin aimed to enclose the USSR deeper in intellectual quarantine. The main exception to this was kept secret: he relied heavily on scientific and technological espionage to steal the foreign discoveries needed for the development of Soviet military and industrial might. Otherwise the guiding principle was that everything foreign was inferior and damaging. With this in mind he called Alexander Fadeev and two literary colleagues, Konstantin Simonov and Boris Gorbatov, to the Kremlin along with Molotov and Zhdanov on 13 May 1947. Fadeev, Chairman of the USSR Union of Writers, was expecting to discuss book royalties policy. But Stalin had an ulterior motive. Once policy on royalties had been settled, he handed over a letter for Fadeev to read aloud to the gathering. The contents related to a possible anti-cancer drug developed by two Soviet scientists who had released details about it to American publishers.¹⁰ Fadeev was terrified as Stalin did his trick of walking up and down behind the backs of his guests. As Fadeev turned towards him, the sight of Stalin — stern-faced and watchful — agitated him further. Stalin declared: ‘We’ve got to liquidate the spirit of self-humiliation.’

Fadeev was relieved to hear he was not in trouble but was being entrusted with the campaign against foreign influences and fashions. This could not be done by the Ministry of External Affairs without unsettling relations with the West.¹¹ (Just for once the eyewitnesses could record Stalin’s specific calculations.) Stalin was planning to complete the closure of the Soviet intellectual mind. His own mind was already insulated from foreign influences. Now he was plotting the systematic reproduction of his mentality across the USSR.

Simonov wrote down Stalin’s words:¹²

But here’s the sort of theme which is very important and which writers ought to take an interest in. This is the theme of our Soviet patriotism. If you take average members of our intelligentsia, the scholarly intelligentsia, professors and doctors, their feeling of Soviet patriotism has been inadequately nourished in them. They engage in an unjustified grovelling before foreign culture. They all feel themselves still immature and not quite 100 per cent personalities; they’ve got used to the position of eternal pupils.

Stalin continued:¹³

This is a backward tradition and it can be traced from Peter the Great. Peter had some good ideas but too many Germans soon established themselves; this was a period of grovelling before the Germans. Just look, for example, at how hard it was for [the eighteenth-century Russian polymath] Lomonosov to breathe, at how hard it was for him to work. First it was the Germans, then the French. There was much grovelling before foreigners, before shits.

Although Stalin was an admirer of Peter the Great, he was setting himself up as a ruler who could finally eradicate the syndrome of the feelings of inferiority characteristic of Russian intellectual life since the Petrine epoch.

By the Second World War he had stopped deluding himself that he could increase his control over the Soviet order, but in most ways he was proud of what he had consolidated.¹⁴ He acknowledged that great changes would have to take place before the communism of Marx, Engels and Lenin could be realised. Yet he inserted his own peculiar ideas. In the 1920s he had of course stirred up controversy by saying that socialism could be constructed in a single country surrounded by hostile capitalist states. This had contrasted with the convention of Bolshevik theorists, including Lenin, that there would have to be more than one powerful state committed to socialism before such construction could be completed. Before the war Stalin had gone further by suggesting that the building of communism — the perfect stateless form of society dreamed about by Marxists until his emergence — could be started in the USSR on its own.¹⁵

Stalin had explained his idea to the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939: ‘Shall our state also be retained in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of military attack from abroad is liquidated.’¹⁶ He gave no indication of how the state would, as Lenin had anticipated in The State and Revolution in 1917–18, ‘wither away’. Molotov brought this theoretical inadequacy to Stalin’s attention. The root of the problem could be traced back to the assertion in the USSR Constitution of 1936 that the Soviet state functioned on the principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work. As Molotov had argued, this was not the real state of affairs in the USSR. Socialism was not yet near to completion. It was especially wrong to treat the kolkhozes as a socialist form of economy. Huge unfairness existed in the administration of society. Molotov also rejected the whole contention that socialism could be brought to completion in a single country. Building could start; it could be continued. Yet it could not be consummated.¹⁷ Stalin understood what Molotov was saying but fobbed him off: ‘I recognise theory, but I understand things like this: this is life and not theory.’¹⁸ Life, as Stalin saw it from the late 1930s, required the spreading of pride in the existing order of state and society even if this involved sullying the purity of Leninist doctrines.

He took intense delight in Soviet achievements. As he and Georgian Communist Party boss Akaki Mgeladze looked at a map, he mused:¹⁹

Let’s see what we have here. In the north we have everything in order and normal. Finland has given way to us and we’ve pushed the frontier up from Leningrad. The Baltic region — which consists of truly Russian lands! — is ours again; all the Belorussians are now living with us and so are the Ukrainians and the Moldavians. Everything’s normal in the west.

He was equally pleased about the east: ‘What have we got here?… The Kurile Islands are now ours, Sakhalin is wholly ours: doesn’t that look good! And Port Arthur and Dalni [Darien] are both ours. The Chinese Railway is ours. As to China and Mongolia, everything’s in order.’ The only frontier annoying him was the southern one. Presumably he itched to obtain the Straits of the Dardanelles and perhaps also northern Iran. He had come to aspire to the restoration of the Russian Imperial frontiers and regard the foreign policy objectives of the Romanovs as his own; and works on the history of Muscovy and the Russian Empire, including Nikolai Karamzin’s classic nineteenth-century series of volumes, had an increased appeal for him.

Stalin’s passion for things Russian had become hypertrophied. When reading V. V. Piotrovski’s In the Steps of Ancient Cultures, he came across the name ‘Rusa’ in a section on the Assyrians. He took note of this,²⁰ evidently thinking the word might give a clue about the origins of Russian nationhood. Anything with the slightest connection with Russia caught his eye. Like an elderly trainspotter who has to see one last steam engine before giving up the hobby, he had turned from enthusiast into zealot.

Few authors failed to incur some criticism from him. Piotrovski was among them. On the margin of the page where the author had claimed credentials as a pioneer in the historiography of culture, Stalin scoffed: ‘Ha, ha!’²¹ Stalin had combed purposefully through Piotrovski’s book. The notes he took on the ancient languages of the Middle East were important for him, for he intended to write a lengthy piece on linguistics. To say that this caused surprise among the Soviet intelligentsia is an understatement. The expectation had been that when he took up the pen again he would offer his thoughts on politics or economics. But Stalin went his own way. In the course of his extensive reading he had come across the works of Nikolai Marr. A member of the Russian Imperial Academy before 1917, Marr had made his peace with the Soviet state and adjusted his theories to the kind of Marxism popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Marr had argued that Marxists should incorporate ‘class principles’ in linguistics as much as in politics. Language was to be regarded as class-specific and as the creation of whichever class happened to be in power. This was the official orthodoxy which Stalin had decided to overthrow.

Articles appeared in Pravda in summer 1950 and were collected in a booklet entitled Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. University faculties across the USSR stopped whatever they were doing to study Stalin’s ideas.²² Much of what he wrote was a healthy antidote to current ideas in Soviet linguistics. Marr had argued that the contemporary Russian language had been a bourgeois phenomenon under capitalism and should be re-created as a socialist phenomenon under the dictatorship