Publishing the collected works of Bolshevik leaders was a small industry in the prewar USSR. As early as 1923, a twenty-two-volume edition of Zinoviev’s writings was in print. In 1929 Trotsky’s collected works reached volume twenty. By the mid-1930s, there were already three editions of Lenin’s collected works. By these standards, the publication of Stalin’s works was slow off the mark.
The indefatigable Tovstukha started gathering material for Stalin’s collected works in the early 1930s, and in 1931 Stalin himself sketched a plan for an eight-volume edition. In August 1935 – a fortnight after Tovstukha’s death – the Politburo, spurred on by the unauthorised republication of his pre-revolutionary writings, passed a resolution decreeing the publication of Stalin’s collected works. The job was given to IMEL, in conjunction with Stetsky and the party’s propaganda department.36
By November, Stetsky had outlined to Stalin the plans for publication. There would be eight to ten volumes called Sochineniya (Works or Writings). The edition would contain Stalin’s previously published writings plus unpublished items such as stenograms of speeches, letters, notes and telegrams. The documents would be published in chronological order and would be supported by detailed factual information on their content. The volumes would contain a chronology of Stalin’s life and political activities and would be published in all the national languages of the USSR as well as various foreign languages.37
In later years, the intended number of volumes was increased to twelve and then to sixteen but the rest of the plan remained much the same and, indeed, was mostly delivered. However, it took a lot longer than expected. The intention was to publish the first volumes in 1936 and to complete the series by 1937 – in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. But the first volume did not see the light of day for another decade, for reasons that were many and varied.
The technical challenge was that Stalin’s earliest writings were in Georgian, many of them published anonymously or under pseudonyms. They had to be identified, authenticated as Stalin’s and then translated into Russian. There was a bit of a turf war between IMEL and its Tbilisi affiliate, which was controlled by the Georgian communist party. Needless to say, the Georgian comrades were keen to assert custodianship of their native son’s youthful writings. Then there was the disruptive impact of the Great Terror. In the mid-1930s many IMEL staff were arrested or dismissed from their posts as ‘enemies of the people’. The terror also cut a swathe through the ranks of party historians. Among party officials, Stetsky was a prominent victim; he was arrested and shot in 1938. During the Great Patriotic War, many IMEL staffers served in the armed forces, often as political officers in charge of propaganda, education and morale. The section responsible for Stalin’s works was reduced to three people and evacuated to Ufa. Among its additional responsibilities was the urgent preparation of special wartime collections of Stalin’s writings, with stirring titles like ‘Articles and Speeches about Ukraine’ and ‘The Military Correspondence of Lenin and Stalin’.38
There is no evidence that Stalin was unduly worried about the delays. This was a project for posterity; in the meantime there were millions upon millions of copies of Stalin’s books already circulating in the USSR: The Foundations of Leninism, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, Problems of Leninism and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. During the war these Stalinist classics were joined by a collection of Stalin’s speeches, On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union.
IMEL sent Stalin regular progress reports and consulted him about matters great and small, including the technicalities of translating his Georgian writings. He was often remiss or slow to reply to queries and not until the eve of the first volume’s publication in 1946 did he become intensively involved in the process and take charge of curating his own intellectual legacy. Stalin was sent a ‘dummy’ (in Russian, maket) of each volume, from which he would make the final selection of documents to be published. He used the opportunity to correct and edit texts. Stalin’s handwritten amendments were stylistic rather than substantive. It was a case of him glossing rather than rewriting his personal history.39
Besides, politically embarrassing or dubious statements had already been weeded out by the time the proofs arrived on Stalin’s desk. More often than not, weeding took the form of omission and elision rather than the direct doctoring of documents. History was not so much altered by Stalin’s underlings as distorted. The trickiest issue was how to deal with favourable mentions in his writings of people who were at the time Stalin’s comrades-in-arms but later became political opponents or, worse still, ‘enemies of the state’. Among them were the many former leaders of the party who had been accused of treason and arraigned at a series of gruesome show trials in the 1930s. Where possible, favourable references to them were excluded, and those texts that featured Stalin’s polemics against them omitted ‘comrade’ when referring to them. One egregious example of such censorship was this omission from an article by Stalin on the Bolshevik seizure of power that was originally published by Pravda in November 1918:
All the practical work of organising the insurrection was conducted under the ingenious leadership of the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It is safe to say that the rapid switching of the [Petrograd] garrison to the side of the Soviet was due to the work of the party’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, above all Comrade Trotsky.40
A key figure in the preparation of Stalin’s works was a young historian called Vasily Mochalov, who specialised in the history of the labour movement in the Caucasus. He knew Georgian very well and was appointed head of IMEL’s Stalin section in 1940. Frustrated by the slow progress, he wrote to Stalin and the Politburo in August 1944 to urge the appointment of extra staff and the imposition of short deadlines for the publication of the first two or three volumes.41
While Stalin did not reply to Mochalov’s letter, it provoked a flurry of Politburo decisions to speed up the project, which did not please Mochalov’s superiors in IMEL.42 His letter cast them in a bad light and added to the pressure to produce results. Mochalov was also in conflict with the Georgian comrades about translation issues and about which unsigned publications to attribute to Stalin. According to his Tbilisi colleagues, Mochalov’s knowledge of the languages and history of the Caucasus was inadequate and had led to mistakes in the editing and translation of Stalin’s early writings.
In October 1944 Mochalov was told by IMEL’s newly appointed director, Vladimir Kruzhkov, that the Institute no longer required his services. When Mochalov asked why, he was told it was because of a personality clash between him and Kruzhkov.43 In his correspondence with the Politburo, Kruzhkov blamed Mochalov, and former IMEL director M. B. Mitin, for the lack of progress in the publication of Stalin’s collected works.44 Undaunted, Mochalov continued to participate in the Institute’s discussions about the preparation of the Sochineniya and to register his objections to IMEL’s handling of the project. He also reached out to Stalin again, asking for a meeting to discuss the publication. His efforts were rewarded by a summons to meet Stalin on 28 December 1945. Also in attendance was Kruzhkov, and Pyotr Shariya, the Georgian communist party’s propaganda chief and the former head of IMEL’s Tbilisi office.
Mochalov wrote quite a detailed report of the meeting, which took place in Stalin’s Kremlin office in the evening and lasted for ninety minutes.