Stalin began the meeting by asking about the disagreements between Kruzhkov and Mochalov. Kruzhkov claimed these had been resolved but Mochalov restated his objections to including in the first two volumes several articles whose authorship was uncertain, including two articles published in the Georgian newspaper Brdzola (Struggle), which he thought had a ‘calm tone’ compared to other articles attributed to Stalin.
When Stalin asked if his objections were the reason he had been kicked out of IMEL, Mochalov replied that it was for Kruzhkov to say, but, in his view, the director was obviously not happy about the letter he had written to the party leadership. Mochalov also mentioned his differences with Shariya, who favoured old-style translation as opposed to the ‘new translation’ that Mochalov advocated.
Stalin responded by saying that while some of the translation was poor, part of it was quite artistic and it seemed to be the work of a different translator. ‘Translation’, opined Stalin, ‘is more difficult than writing.’ He then mused on the need to amend his writings, taking as an example his articles on ‘Anarchism or Socialism?’, which he had written on the hoof in instalments for different newspapers.
About his articles in Brdzola, Stalin agreed their tones were different. The calm tone, he explained, was because he ‘aspired to be a professor and wanted to go to university. . . . The Batumi shootings changed everything for me. I started to curse. . . . The tone changed.’45
Discussing the size of the print run, Stalin modestly suggested that 30,000–40,000 copies would be enough. When someone pointed out the print run for Lenin’s collected works was half a million, Stalin said that he was no Lenin, but was eventually persuaded to accept a figure of 300,000. Stalin wanted each volume to be no more than 300–360 pages long. He preferred the small-scale format of Lenin’s works but was indifferent as to whether the cover should be grey or claret (the colour actually chosen).46
According to Mochalov’s wife, Raisa Konushaya (who also worked at IMEL), he returned home from the meeting ‘ashen-faced but bright-eyed’. He told her that Stalin had supported his position and publications that were not his would be excluded from the first two volumes of the works.47 However, Shariya’s recollection was that Stalin let Mochalov have his say and then proceeded to claim the authorship of the disputed unsigned publications.48
Not long after the meeting in Stalin’s office, the Politburo passed another resolution on the publication of his works. There would be sixteen volumes, each with a print run of 500,000, priced at six roubles a book. The first three volumes would be published in 1946, volumes four to ten in 1947 and the rest in 1948. Resolutions were also passed on the speedy translation of the series into various languages, with print runs in the tens and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands.49 The edition was announced publicly in Pravda on 20 January 1946 and the first volume went on sale in July.
Stalin contributed a preface to the first volume in which he urged his readers to regard his early writings as the work ‘of a young Marxist not yet moulded into a finished Marxist-Leninist’. He highlighted two youthful errors. He admitted to having been wrong to advocate the distribution of landlords’ lands to the peasants as private property rather than taking them into state ownership, as Lenin favoured. This first mistake he linked to his failure to appreciate fully Lenin’s view that the popular overthrow of Tsarist autocracy would be rapidly followed by a socialist revolution in Russia. Stalin also admitted he had been wrong to go along with the then prevailing view among Marxists that socialist revolutions required the majority of the population in any given state to be working class, whereas Lenin had shown that the victory of socialism was possible even in a predominantly peasant country like Russia.50
Thirteen volumes of the Works covering the period 1901–34 were published between 1946 and 1949. Publication then stalled and the project was cancelled after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th party congress.
It is hard to understand why the final three volumes were not published while Stalin was alive. ‘Dummies’ of all the volumes were available to him from 1946 onwards. One possibility is that Stalin couldn’t make up his mind about whether to update the 1938 Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was slated for publication as volume fifteen of his works (its authorship now having been attributed to him rather than an anonymous party commission). In October 1946 Kruzhkov sent him the dummy of that book, together with a note detailing what corrections had been made to the original. In January 1947 party propaganda chief Georgy Alexandrov (1908–1961) and Pyotr Fedoseev (1908–1990), editor of the party’s journal, Bol’shevik, sent him drafts of two chapters that extended the CPSU’s history to 1945, taking their cues from Stalin’s February 1946 election speech in which he had characterised the war and analysed the reasons for the Soviet victory. In August 1948 another party official submitted a draft of two additional chapters of the Short Course, seemingly at Stalin’s own request. In 1951 yet another dummy of volume fifteen, containing just the corrected 1938 text, was sent to Stalin but it, too, was never published.51
Volume fourteen, covering the period 1934–40, was also problematic, not least because of Stalin’s effusive reply to sixtieth birthday greetings from Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop: ‘The friendship between the peoples of Germany and of the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every basis for being lasting and firm.’ Such embarrassments could be glossed over but publication of the volume would inevitably draw attention to the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939–41.52
Far better for Stalin’s public image was the proposed publication of an edition of his wartime correspondence with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. His long-time deputy, Vyacheslav Molotov, was put in charge of this important project in the late 1940s and two volumes of correspondence were ready for printing by 1952. There was no tampering with these documents, since copies of his private messages to Churchill and Roosevelt were readily available in western archives. Again, publication was delayed for no obvious reason and the volumes did not appear until 1957. Most likely, this was because of the favourable treatment of Tito in the correspondence. Tito, the communist leader of a mass partisan movement in Yugoslavia, was then a Soviet hero and a Stalin favourite. The two men fell out after the war and Tito was excommunicated from the communist movement on grounds that he was, in fact, an imperi—alist agent bent on the restoration of capitalism in Yugoslavia. After Stalin’s death, this impediment to the publication of the correspondence was removed by Khrushchev’s disavowal of the Stalin–Tito split and the restoration of fraternal relations with socialist Yugoslavia.53
As the American historian Robert H. McNeal observed, ‘Stalin’s Sochineniya falls far short of the standards one would hope for in a definitive collection of a statesman’s papers.’54 The Works, as they are called in the English translation, claimed to contain ‘nearly all’ of Stalin’s writings, yet McNeal identified 895 separate writings that had been signed by or identified as Stalin’s for the period covered by the thirteen published volumes, only 480 of which appeared in the Sochineniya. McNeal’s figure was inflated by an excessive number of unsigned pre-1917 publications attributed to Stalin by Beria and other Soviet authors, but there is no doubt that many documents that were verifiably his were omitted from the Sochineniya. In the Russian archives there are lists of nearly a hundred such items left out of the volumes.55 While some documents may have been omitted because they were deemed trivial or repetitive, in many cases the motivation was plainly political. The analysis of these unpublished texts awaits their historian, but it is difficult to disagree with Olga Edel’man’s comment that they do not reveal a Stalin substantially different from the one that presents himself in those that were published.56