Stalin: A Biography

work. It was said that Stalin either did not really write it or wrote it only with decisive help from others. Supposedly his ghost writer was Lenin. That Lenin and others assisted with their suggestions about the draft is undeniable. This is a quite normal procedure for sensible writers: it is better to have necessary criticism before than after publication. Another hypothesis was that Stalin’s inability to read foreign languages, except for a few phrases with the help of a German–Russian dictionary, meant that he could not have read the works by Austrian Marxists appearing in his footnotes. Anyone who has read Marxism and the National Question, however, will know that most of the references to books by Otto Bauer, Karl Renner and others are made to the widely available Russian translations. The other point is that Lenin was a proud author. If he had really written the book, he would have published it under one of his own pseudonyms.

Lenin liked Marxism and the National Question because Stalin agreed with him about the basic solution. An additional advantage was that Stalin was not a Russian but a Georgian. After the turn of the century the Marxists of the Habsburg Monarchy — especially Bauer and Renner — argued that the empire was a patchwork quilt of nationalities and that nation-states could not neatly be cut out of it. Their answer was to offer every nation a representative body of its own at the centre of the empire with the mission to enhance national interests. The Mensheviks, with encouragement from the Jewish Bund as well as from Noe Zhordania, adopted Bauer’s plan as the future basis of state structure in the Russian Empire once the Romanovs had been overthrown. Stalin, however, adhered to the official Bolshevik position that administrative autonomy should be given to non- Russians in areas where they lived in concentration. The Finns in Finland and the Ukrainians in Ukraine were the usual examples. Thus the Bolsheviks hoped to maintain a centralised state while acceding to national and ethnic aspirations.

Stalin was not simply parroting Lenin’s earlier writings. There is a passage in Marxism and the National Question which merits close attention since it deals with Georgia. It deserves to be quoted in full:¹³

Let us take the Georgians. The Georgians of the years before the Great Reforms [of the 1860s] lived in a common territory and spoke a common language but strictly speaking they did not constitute a nation since, being split into a whole range of principalities cut off from each other, they could not live a common economic life and they waged wars among themselves for centuries and devastated each other, fomenting trouble between the Persians and the Turks. The ephemeral and accidental unification of the principalities which a successful tsar was occasionally able to carry out at best covered only the surface of the administrative sphere — and it was quickly wrecked on the caprices of the dukes and the indifference of the peasants.

So much for the idea that Georgians were a primordial nation, fully developed before their incorporation in the Russian Empire.

Stalin’s argument continued as follows:¹⁴

Georgia as a nation made its appearance only in the second half of the nineteenth century when the collapse of feudal law and the rise of the country’s economic life, the development of the means of communication and the birth of capitalism established a division of labour among Georgia’s regions, finally shattered the economic isolation of the principalities and bound them together as a single whole.

This is crude materialist history, but it has a cogency within the analytical frame constructed by Stalin for the examination of nationhood. In order to be considered a nation the Georgians had to share not only their ‘psychic’ background and territory but also their economic life.

This was not an original point among Georgian Marxists. Zhordania, too, had always stressed that sharp contrasts separated the many regions of tiny Georgia.¹⁵ There was a difference in emphasis, however, between Zhordania and Stalin. Whereas Zhordania wanted most inhabitants of Georgia to assimilate themselves to a Georgian identity, Stalin continued to acknowledge that Georgianisation was nowhere near fulfilment. Both Zhordania and Stalin were socialist internationalists. Yet Stalin was not off the mark when highlighting the nationalist ingredients in the outlook — however unconsciously held — of his Menshevik adversaries. Stalin questioned in particular whether the Mingrelians and Adzharians, who lived in western Georgia, should be regarded as Georgians.¹⁶ What are we to make of this? The first lesson is surely that Stalin was a more sensitive analyst of his native Georgia and the surrounding region than is usually thought. (Not that we should feel too sorry for him: in later years he turned into the most brutal ruler the Caucasus had known since Tamurlane — and this of course is why his earlier sophistication has been overlooked.) In any case he rejected Menshevik policy as offering simplistic solutions based on inaccurate demographic data.

Stalin stressed that nationhood was a contingent phenomenon. It could come with capitalism. But under changing conditions it could also fade. Some national groups might assimilate to a more powerful nation, others might not. Stalin was firm on the point:¹⁷

There can be no disputing that ‘national character’ is not some permanent given fact but changes according to the conditions of life… And so it is readily understandable that the nation like any historical phenomenon has its own history, its beginning and its end.

It would consequently be senseless for Marxists of any nation to identify themselves permanently with that particular nation. History was on the march. The future lay with socialism, with multinational states and eventually with a global human community.

In writing about Marxists, Stalin was saying much about himself and his developing opinions. The young poet who had called on fellow Georgians to ‘make renowned our Motherland by study’ had vanished.¹⁸ In his place there was an internationalist struggling for the cause of the proletariat of all nations. The Stalin of Marxism and the National Question did not regard the Russians as a problem. Describing contemporary Georgia, he asserted:¹⁹

If campaigns of repression [by the government] touch ‘land’ interests, as has happened in Ireland, the broad peasant masses will soon gather under the banner of the national movement.

If, on the other hand, there is no truly serious anti-Russian nationalism in Georgia, this is above all because no Russian landlords or Russian big bourgeoisie exist there who might feed such nationalism among the [Georgian] masses. What exists in Georgia is anti-Armenian nationalism but this is because there is an Armenian big bourgeoisie which, by crushing the small and as yet weak Georgian bourgeoisie, thrusts the latter towards anti-Armenian nationalism.

Stalin’s analysis pointed to the complexity of the national question in the Russian Empire. It anticipated the bringing together of Russians and Georgians in harmony within the same multinational state.

Evidently he assumed that the Russian Empire, when revolution at last overthrew the Romanovs, should not be broken up into separate states. Even Russian Poland, which Marx and Engels had wanted to gain independence along with other Polish-inhabited lands, should in Stalin’s opinion stay with Russia.²⁰ His rule of thumb was that ‘the right of secession’ should be offered but that no nation should be encouraged to realise it.

What motivated Stalin was the aim to move ‘the backward nations and nationalities into the general channel of a higher culture’. He italicised this phrase in his booklet. The Menshevik proposal for ‘national-cultural autonomy’ would permit the most reactionary religious and social forces to increase their influence and the socialist project would be set back by years:²¹

Where does [‘national-cultural autonomy’] lead and what are its results? Let’s take as an example the Transcaucasian Tatars with their minimal percentage of literacy, their schools headed by omnipotent mullahs and with their culture pervaded by the religious spirit… It is not difficult to understand that organising them into a cultural-national union means to put their mullahs in charge of them, to proffer them up to be devoured by reactionary mullahs and to create a new bastion for the reactionary stultification [zakabalenie] of the Tatar masses by their very worst enemy.