While Stalin never ceased criticising the Tsars, his view of the state they had created shifted radically in the 1930s. During the course of a toast to the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, he said:
The Russian Tsars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interests of landowners. But they did one thing that was good – they amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state. And, for the first time, we, the Bolsheviks, have consolidated and strengthened that state as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of the landowners and the capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers, of all the peoples that make up that state. We have united the state in such a way that if any part were isolated from the common socialist state, it would not only inflict harm on the latter but would be unable to exist independently and would inevitably fall under foreign subjugation.167
In that anniversary year there was a broad shift in Soviet discourse about Russia’s past. The revolution was celebrated as a radical historical break and its heroes lionised, but so, too, was Alexander Pushkin. That year was the cen—tenary of the poet’s death and it provided an opportunity to appropriate him and his works for the Soviet project. He was deemed a revolutionary writer both aesthetically and politically, a man of the people whose poems were accessible to all. ‘Only our time entirely and completely accepts Pushkin and Pushkin’s heritage’, editorialised Literaturnyi Sovremennik (Contemporary Literature). ‘Only now has Pushkin become truly close to millions of hearts. For the new masses conquering the heights of culture, Pushkin is an “eternal companion”.’ A 1931 piece by the former commissar for enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, was reprinted: ‘It is Pushkin who, among others, must become a teacher of the proletarians and peasants in the construction of their inner world. . . . Every grain that is contained in Pushkin’s treasury will yield a socialist rose or a socialist bunch of grapes in the life of every citizen.’168 Also revived was the heroic reputation of Peter the Great in a biopic based on Alexei Tolstoy’s 1934 novel. Peter was lauded as ‘a strong national figure who won territory through war and defended it through diplomacy’ and praised for ‘the achievement of raising Russia to the status of a great power in the European arena’.169
REHABILITATING IVAN THE TERRIBLE
Although Robert Vipper was primarily a historian of the ancient world and of early Christianity, his most influential book was about Russian history – Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible). First published in 1922, Vipper’s book challenged the widely accepted view – in Russia and elsewhere – that Ivan IV was a bloodthirsty tyrant. Vipper’s Ivan was fearsome and menacing towards the Russian state’s domestic and foreign foes. Strengthening the monarchy was necessary to empower the Russian state and external threats and pressures motivated his harsh internal regime. His struggle for power against Russia’s barons was just, and his security apparatus – the much-maligned Oprichnina – as honourable as it was effective. He was also a great warlord and diplomat who had built Russia into one of the greatest states in the world.170
Vipper was not alone in his rehabilitation of Ivan’s reputation. S. F. Platonov (1860–1933) mounted a similar defence in his 1923 book on Ivan the Terrible.171 We don’t know for certain if Stalin read either of these books, since neither is to be found among the remnants of his personal library, although it does contain a copy of Platonov’s 1924 history of Russia’s north and the colonisation of its coastal lands.172 It is not unreasonable to assume that Stalin read Vipper’s book and that it influenced his conversion to a positive view of Ivan the Terrible’s role in Russian history. The earliest hint that this was Stalin’s direction of travel was his editing the first volume of Istoriya Grazhdanskoi Voiny v SSSR (History of the Civil War in the USSR) in 1934. He deleted a reference to Ivan IV as the initiator of the Tsarist policy of aggressive, land-grabbing conquests. The Tsars remained repressive as a group but Ivan was nothing special in that regard.173
This civil war history was Maxim Gorky’s project, the writer with whom Stalin maintained close relations. At the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934, Gorky made this somewhat ambiguous point which, depending on the folklore in question, could be construed as either anti-Vipper or anti-Pokrovsky:
Since olden times folklore has been in constant and quaint attendance on history. It has its own opinion regarding the actions of Louis XI and Ivan the Terrible and this opinion sharply diverges from the appraisal of history, written by specialists who were not greatly interested in the question as to what the combat between monarchs and feudal lords meant to the life of the toiling people.174
Vipper was not a Marxist, or even a Bolshevik sympathiser, and neither he nor his views on Ivan the Terrible were welcomed by the Pokrovsky-led Soviet historical establishment. In an article on Ivan IV for the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia in 1933, Pokrovsky’s pupil M. V. Nechkina attacked Vipper’s book as a product of the counter-revolutionary intelligentsia and a veiled appeal for a fight against Bolshevism.175 But the tide was already turning in Vipper’s favour. Following Stalin’s favourable reference to him during the history-teaching discussion and the publication of Shestakov’s book, Vipper’s textbook on the History of the Middle Ages was reprinted and placed on the syllabus of the higher party school for propagandists. In a 1938 article about Soviet historical writing on the ancient world, A. V. Mishulin commented that Vipper ‘unquestionably represented the peak of bourgeois science in ancient history. It would be utterly unjust if we failed to take his contributions to ancient history into consideration as we proceed to reconstruct the teaching of world history.’176 In a 1939 volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia that dealt with the Oprichnina, both Vipper and Platonov received favourable mentions.177 That same year saw the publication of the USSR history textbook for university students. Its section on the sixteenth century was written by S. V. Bakhrushin:
No-one denies the great and strong intellect of Ivan IV. . . . He was well-educated for his day . . . and possessed literary talent. . . . He was an outstanding strategist and a capable leader of military action. Ivan the Terrible correctly understood the requirements of domestic and foreign policy. . . . In many cases his cruel actions were provoked by the stubborn opposition of the great feudal lords to his endeavours and by outright treason on their part. . . . Ivan the Terrible recognised the necessity of creating a strong state and did not hesitate to take harsh measures.178
A campaign to ‘restore the true image of Ivan IV in Russian history, which has been distorted by aristocratic and bourgeois historiography’, was launched by the party at the end of 1940.179 As Kevin Platt points out, with the outbreak of war in June 1941, ‘the campaign to rehabilitate Ivan took on an overtly mobilizational character’.180
The renowned cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) was commissioned to direct a film about Ivan IV, and Alexei Tolstoy (1883–1945) to write a play.
The director of Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October: 10 Days that Shook the World (1928), Eisenstein’s most recent film had been Alexander Nevsky (1938), a patriotic biopic of the thirteenth-century Russian prince who had defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle on the Ice on Lake Chudskoe. Tolstoy, whose origins were aristocratic, was distantly related to both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Primarily a science fiction writer and historical novelist, his Peter the Great book was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1941.181