By the end of March the Politburo had resolved to establish groups of historians to work on new textbooks.151 Stalin’s preferred outcome to that process was signalled by the publication in May 1934 of a state decree ‘On the Teaching of Civic History in the Schools of the USSR’:
Instead of civic history being taught in a lively and engaging way, with an account of the most important events and facts in chronological order, and with sketches of historical figures, pupils are given abstract definitions of socio-economic formations that replace consecutive exposition with abstract sociological schemas.
The decisive condition for the lasting assimilation of a course of history is the maintenance of chronological sequence in the exposition of historical events, with due emphasis on memorisation by pupils of important facts, names and dates. Only such a course of history can provide pupils with the accessible, clear and concrete historical materials that will enable them to correctly analyse and summarise historical events and lead them to a Marxist understanding of history.152
The history of the USSR was of most interest to Stalin, although the title of the proposed textbook was something of a misnomer since much of it would be devoted to the pre-revolutionary history of Tsarist Russia. Progress on the project was so slow and unsatisfactory that in January 1936 the party leadership decided to organise a public competition and invited submissions of various textbooks, in the first instance those on modern history and the history of the Soviet Union. To guide contestants, Pravda republished two sets of notes, jointly authored by Stalin, the late Kirov and party ideology chief Andrei Zhdanov, which commented on previously submitted outlines of proposed books. The main criticisms of the outline for a book on the history of the USSR were, first, that it was not a history of the Soviet Union and all its peoples but of ‘Great Russia’ and the Russians; second, it had not emphasised enough that internally Tsarism was a ‘prison of people’ and externally a reactionary ‘international gendarme’; and, third, the authors had ‘forgotten that Russian revolutionaries regarded themselves as disciples and followers of the noted leaders of bourgeois-revolutionary and Marxist thought in the West’.153
It took a year to whittle down the many submissions on Soviet history to a shortlist of seven, none of which were adjudged popular and accessible enough. Eventually, a twelve-strong group headed by Andrei Shestakov (1877–1941), a Moscow-based agrarian historian, was awarded a second-class prize (worth 75,000 roubles). The result of the competition was announced in August 1937, just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution.154 It meant that Shestakov’s book would become a designated secondary school text on the history of Russia and the USSR.155
Millions of copies of the 223-page Kratkii Kurs Istorii SSSR (Short Course History of the USSR) were printed. Among its first recipients was Stalin’s eleven-year-old daughter, who was given an inscribed copy: ‘To Svetlana Stalina from J. Stalin 30/8/1937’. She appears to have read it attentively, paying particular attention to its many coloured maps, such as the one on the USSR that she used to trace the events of the Russian Civil War, including the role played by her father in the defence of Tsaritsyn.156
Shestakov’s book was aimed at third- and fourth-grade pupils. Textbooks with similar approaches and themes were then produced for use by older pupils and university students.157
Stalin was so heavily involved in the preparation of the Shestakov book that Russian historian Alexander Dubrovsky considers him not merely an editor but one of the book’s de facto authors.158
When editing a maket (dummy) of the book, Stalin paid much attention to the sections on revolutionary Russia and the Soviet period.159 As he habitually did, Stalin toned down and reduced the coverage and adulation of him and his life. Finding his date of birth in the book’s chronology of important historical events, he crossed it out and wrote beside it ‘Bastards!’160 Left in by Stalin was this entry: ‘1870–1924 Life of the Genius Leader of the Proletariat – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’. The chronology ended with entries on the Kirov assassination of December 1934 and adoption of a new Soviet constitution in 1936.
Stalin’s most important changes were to the book’s treatment of Ivan IV (the Terrible) (1530–1584). He struck out a statement that Ivan had ordered the execution of all those living in Kazan following a siege of the city by his forces. Allowed to stand, however, was the sentence ‘Kazan was plundered and burnt’. Nor did he like the implications of the authors’ claim that Ivan wanted to expand Russia to the Baltic Sea to establish contact with the educated peoples of western Europe, so he excised the word ‘educated’. Stalin did approve of their view that Ivan had established the autonomous power of Tsarism by destroying the aristocratic boyars, but added that in so doing he had completed the task of forging a scattered collection of principalities into a single strong state that had been initiated by Ivan I in the fourteenth century.161 The chapter’s concluding verdict on Ivan IV was that under his rule the domain of Russia expanded exponentially and his ‘kingdom became one of the strongest states in the world’.162
The dummy contained many illustrations, some of which Stalin didn’t like. A notable excision was Ilya Repin’s famous painting of Ivan the Terrible and his dying son – which alluded to the claim that he had been killed by his father following a family row. Instead, the book carried a photograph of Victor Vasnetsov’s 1897 painting of Ivan, which depicted a stern-looking but majestic Tsar.163
After publication Shestakov was at pains to point out the book had been prepared with the direct participation of the central committee of the communist party.164 Among the party leadership’s many contributions was a directive from Zhdanov that its authors needed to revise the manuscript in order to ‘strengthen throughout elements of Soviet patriotism and love for the socialist motherland’.165 The end result was a stirring story of a thousand-year struggle by Russia and its Soviet successor to build a strong state to defend its population from outside incursions.
The dissemination of this new narrative of continuity in Russian and Soviet history was part of Stalin’s efforts to imbue the USSR with a patriotic as well as a communist identity. David Brandenberger labels this repositioning by Stalin ‘national bolshevism’, while for Erik van Ree it was a form of ‘revolutionary patriotism’. Stalin preferred the idea of ‘Soviet patriotism’ – the dual loyalty of citizens to the socialist system, which looked after their welfare, and to the state that protected them.
Stalin’s patriotism was far from being merely a political device to mobilise the population and strengthen support for the Soviet system: it was integral to his changing views of the Tsars and Russian history.
Decidedly negative was the view of Tsarism expounded in Stalin’s 1924 lecture on The Foundations of Leninism, where he characterised the Tsarist state as ‘the home of every kind of oppression – capitalist, colonial, militarist – in its most inhumane and barbarous form’. Tsarism was the ‘watchdog of imperialism’ in eastern Europe and the ‘agent of Western imperialism’ in Russia itself. Russian nationalism was aggressive and oppressive and Tsarist Russia was ‘the most faithful ally of Western imperialism in the partition of Turkey, Persia, China, etc.’166