Stalin: A Biography

children in the country.

He strove to identify himself with young people in general. Pravda reproduced many photos of him greeting heroes of labour, science or exploration. Astutely he did not always monopolise the publicity. The typical front page of newspapers gave pride of space to young heroes of the moment: Stakhanovite miners or metalworkers, record-breaking milkmaids, geographical explorers or long-distance aviators. Citizens were invited to believe that the state led by Stalin had a dynamic orientation towards science, education, meritocracy and patriotism. Aviators had a special attraction for Stalin. When a celebratory book appeared on his meetings with individuals of outstanding achievement, Soviet flyers were given greater space than any other category of person. He loved to meet them: ‘You know how I’ll fight like a tiger so that no one may give offence to our flyers!’;⁹ and they were understandably pleased by his attentiveness and by the medals they received from him.¹⁰ By sharing the plaudits with Soviet citizens beyond the inner circle of powerful political leaders he enhanced his image as a modest man of the people. For Stalin, aviators and explorers had the advantage of operating far away from the public gaze. By contrast industrial managers and party bosses were widely unpopular and indeed Stalin routinely castigated them whenever (his own) policies caused resentment. Culpable subordinates served as a lightning conductor that deflected political damage on to others.

Stalin also aimed to associate himself with leaders of official organisations and enterprises at lower levels of the Soviet state. While arresting a multitude of the older post-holders in the 1930s, he issued appeals to those younger ones who took their place. Having long represented himself as a praktik, he declared at a Kremlin reception for metallurgical and coal-mining functionaries on 30 October 1937:¹¹

I’m going to propose a somewhat peculiar and unconventional toast. Our custom is to toast the health of the [Kremlin’s] leaders, chiefs, heads and people’s commissars. This of course isn’t a bad thing. But apart from the big leaders there also exist middle-size and small leaders. We have tens of thousands of them, these leaders — both small and middling. They are modest people. They don’t push themselves forward and they’re practically invisible. But it would be blind of us not to notice them. For the fate of production across our entire people’s economy depends on these people.

He chose his words subtly so as to avoiding reducing himself to the level of his audience. He left no doubt that he was one of the ‘big leaders’, and the cult of the Vozhd confirmed that he was the biggest of them. This mixture of self-assertion and modesty won friends and influenced the Kremlin elite, the party and the people.

Stalin liked to be seen to be restricting the cultic extravaganza. Worship had to be effusive but not totally ridiculous in its extent. He frequently reprimanded his underlings if, unable to guess his opinion, they overstepped the mark of flattery. He was made angry by an attempt to publish his articles from the years before the Great War. Stalin wrote to Kaganovich, Yezhov and Molotov in August 1936 — while he was on holiday by the Black Sea — seeking their help in preventing publication.¹² (Obviously he could have given a direct order and it would have been instantly obeyed; but Stalin also wanted to impress on the Politburo that he remained a member of a political team.) He continued to comment scathingly on what was written about him. Stalin exclaimed to one of his physicians, M. G. Shneidorovich, about the inaccuracies in Soviet newspapers: ‘Look, you’re an intelligent man, doctor, and you must understand: there’s not a word of truth in them!’ The physician was beginning to feel he had the Leader’s confidence until Stalin added that doctors were just as unreliable as journalists — and doctors had the means and opportunity to poison him!¹³

Beria could nevertheless publish a history of Bolshevik party organisations in the Transcaucasus. This had gained Stalin’s sanction. Beria’s book controverted the received opinion that only the Marxists of St Petersburg or the emigration had had a decisive impact on the fate of the party. Although the contents were mostly a historical fiction, the theme of the historical importance of the borderlands was overdue its attention. (Beria, though, was not the authentic author: he commissioned and appropriated the text and then shot the writers.) Beria’s great Caucasian rival, Nestor Lakoba, produced an account of Stalin’s experiences along the Black Sea littoral after the turn of the century.¹⁴ Some memoirs also appeared about Stalin in Siberian exile.¹⁵ Yet there was little detail about the episodes in his rise to prominence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War and the circumstances of his co-optation to the Central Committee in 1912. Much remained hidden, and Stalin kept it that way. Mystery served his purpose: people would naturally be inclined to assume that he had been more important than was true. He enlarged the space for this to occur by removing his enemies from the history of Bolshevism. Steadily those other Bolsheviks who had been close to Lenin before the October Revolution were eliminated from the textbooks — and in most cases they were physically liquidated.

The grandiose acclaim kept on growing. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in June 1930 Stalin was greeted by ‘stormy, prolonged applause extending into a lengthy ovation’. The Congress rose to its feet shouting ‘Hurrah!’ The same occurred at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, when there was a tremendous ovation and shouts of ‘Long live our Stalin!’ By the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, after the Great Terror, even this was thought inadequate. Congress organisers had arranged chants of ‘Hurrah for our Leader, Teacher and Friend, Comrade Stalin!’

Stalin biographies had been appearing thick and fast. The French writer Henri Barbusse’s 1935 life of the General Secretary was translated into Russian and placed on sale in the USSR.¹⁶ It was Barbusse who put into circulation the phrase: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ But not even Barbusse entirely pleased Stalin. It was this displeasure that led him in 1938 to get the Central Committee to commission Stalin: A Biography, which narrated his life from birth in the little town of Gori to the present day. His towering importance in Bolshevik theory and practice was affirmed. The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course appeared in the same year and covered the periods of communist party history through to the late 1930s. For years there had been competing versions of the history of Soviet communism. Several had enjoyed the approval of the Central Committee, and their authors — Nikolai Popov, Yemelyan Yaroslavski and Andrei Bubnov — had earned large royalties. Yet a single official statement was required when unflinching orthodoxy was a matter of life and death. A team of writers was assembled under V. G. Knorin, Y. M. Yaroslavski and P. N. Pospelov to provide such a work.

Stalin too worked on it behind the scenes; he not only wrote a chapter in the Short Course but also edited the book’s entire text five times.¹⁷ A line of legitimate succession was traced from Marx and Engels through Lenin to Stalin. Tendentiousness and mendacity were the book’s hallmarks. For every point where disputes had arisen among Marxist revolutionaries it was suggested that only one authentic expression of Marxism was available and that Lenin and his follower Stalin had consistently adopted it. Soviet communism’s history was treated in Manichean terms. There were the forces of rectitude led by Leninism and the forces of deceit and betrayal under the anti-Bolshevik parties — the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists and nationalists of all types — as well as, subsequently, the Bolshevik factions hostile to Stalin. The Short Course deplored ‘the Trotskyists, the Bukharinites, nationalist deviators and other anti-Leninist groups’. Not once had Lenin made a mistake in doctrine or strategy. By good fortune a man equally infallible, Stalin himself, succeeded him.

The two leading characters of the Short Course were treated differently. It is usually assumed that the book enabled Stalin to supplant Lenin in the mythology of Soviet communism.¹⁸ This is untrue. Despite creating his own cult, he still found it useful to acknowledge the superiority of Lenin.¹⁹ This was obvious in the handling of the party’s early history. Whereas the official biography gave attention to Stalin’s career as a young revolutionary, his name hardly appeared in the opening chapters of the Short Course.²⁰ In the entire book there were forty-nine citations of Lenin’s works but only eleven of those by Stalin. Evidently Stalin still sensed a continuing need to cloak himself with the mantle of Lenin’s memory.²¹ The treatment of the October Revolution is remarkable in this respect. Its pages on the seizure of power avoided any reference to Stalin.²² (Later generations of historians have missed this; indeed one wonders whether they have bothered to read the Short Course.) The point is that Stalin in the late 1930s, despite dominating the Soviet political scene, saw the desirability of placing a few limits to the worship of his own greatness. Even the Leader had to be cautious.

What is more, there was little in the writings about Stalin which gave a vivid impression of him. Usually the official eulogies are ascribed to a ‘cult of personality’ since this was the term used by Nikita Khrushchev when he