It was not only artists who came under attack for servility to the west. In 1947 there was a public discussion of a book on the history of western philosophy by Georgy Alexandrov, who was head of the party’s propaganda department. That position did not save him from criticism and nor did the fact that his book had been awarded a Stalin Prize in 1946. He was accused of underestimating the Russian contribution to philosophy and of failing to emphasise Marxism’s ideological break with the western tradition. While Stalin was not involved in the public discussion he had voiced his views in private meetings and Zhdanov made it clear that it was the vozhd’ himself who had drawn attention to the book’s flaws. As a result of this controversy, Alexandrov lost his party post, though he was given an only somewhat less important new job as director of an Institute of Philosophy.206
Alexandrov’s 1940 book on the philosophical forerunners of Marxism features in Stalin’s library but the markings in it are not his.207 A piece by Alexandrov that Stalin did read was a co-authored article by him on the same topic that appeared in a 1939 volume of essays on dialectical and historical materialism. Marked by Stalin was the section on Feuerbach, including the citation of Marx’s famous thesis that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’208
In the natural sciences, the campaign against pernicious western influences took the form of so-called ‘honour courts’. The first victims were a biologist, Grigory Roskin, and a microbiologist, Nina Klyueva, who had developed a new method of cancer therapy using a single-celled microorganism, Trypanosoma cruzi. Their sin was to give a copy of the manuscript of their book on treatment methods to American medical colleagues. On Stalin’s initiative the government passed a resolution on the formation of honour courts to assess whether such actions were anti-patriotic. No criminal sanctions were imposed on the two scientists but their ‘trial’ in June 1947 was attended by the cream of the Soviet medical establishment as well as hundreds of other onlookers. A year later the central committee sent a secret circular to party members that recounted the affair and criticised ‘slavishness and servility before things foreign’ and warned against ‘kowtowing and servility before the bourgeois culture of the west’.209
The patriotic imperative was also evident in the so-called Lysenko affair. Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet biologist who specialised in plant science, believed acquired characteristics could be inherited and were hence influenced by environmental changes. This was contrary to Soviet geneticists who contended inheritance was strictly a function of genes and nothing to do with environmental influences or the scientific manipulation of nature. This longstanding debate between the two factions took a new turn in April 1948, when Andrei Zhdanov’s son Yury, who was in charge of the science section of the central committee, gave a lecture criticising Lysenko’s views. Lysenko complained to Stalin and the result was a public apology by Yury Zhdanov and official endorsement of his position via the publication in Pravda of proceedings from a conference of July–August 1948 that expounded Lysenko’s views and trounced those of his geneticist critics.
Politically astute, Lysenko couched his position in terms of ‘Soviet’ versus ‘western’ science, and of ‘materialist, progressive and patriotic’ biology versus ‘reactionary, scholastic and foreign’ biology. It was Lysenko’s patriotism that appealed to Stalin more than anything.210
Stalin also supported Lysenko’s position because it chimed with his own voluntaristic brand of Marxism, notably the belief that the natural world could be radically transformed by active human intervention. In line with this modernist vision, the Soviet press announced in October 1948 ‘The Great Stalinist Plan to Transform Nature’, a project for the mass planting of trees and grasslands and the creation of 44,000 new ponds and reservoirs. ‘Capitalism’, editorialised Pravda, ‘is incapable not only of the planned transformation of nature but of preventing the predatory use of its riches.’211
There was a strong element of Russocentrism in Stalin’s postwar patriotic campaign, a trend that had begun to emerge during the war. When the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a new national anthem (to replace the communist ‘Internationale’), they organised a public competition. One submission deemed worthy of Stalin’s attention contained this pithy verse:
Since the Terrible Tsar, our state has been glorious
It bears the potent might of Peter.
The glory of Suvorov shines behind us
And the winds of Kutuzov’s glory blow.
As our forebears loved the Russian land,
So we, too, love the Soviet land.212
It didn’t make the cut but the winning anthem did contain this key verse:
The unbreakable union of free republics
Has been joined for ever by Great Russia
Long live the united and mighty Soviet Union
Created by the will of the peoples
At a military reception in the Kremlin in May 1945, Stalin proposed a toast to the health of the Soviet people but ‘above all to the Russian people’:
I drink above all to the health of the Russian people because they are the most prominent of the nations that make up the Soviet Union . . . I drink to the health of the Russian people not only because they are the leading people but because they have common sense, social and political common sense, and endurance. Our government made not a few mistakes, we were in a desperate position in 1941–1942 . . . Another people would have said: go to hell, you have betrayed our hopes, we are organising another government. . . . But the Russian people didn’t do that . . . they showed unconditional trust in our government. . . . For the trust in our government shown by the Russian people we say a big thank you.213
The 110th anniversary of Pushkin’s death was commemorated with as much fanfare as his centenary a decade earlier.214 In September 1947 Stalin issued greetings to Moscow on the 800th anniversary of the city’s foundation:
The services which Moscow has rendered are not only that it thrice in the history of our country liberated her from foreign oppression – from the Mongol yoke, from the Polish–Lithuanian invasion, and from French incursion. The service Moscow rendered is primarily that it became the basis for uniting disunited Russia into a single state, with single government and a single leadership.215
Stalin’s Russocentrism should not be overstated. As Jonathan Brunstedt has pointed out, in his February 1946 election speech, Stalin made no special mention of the wartime role of the Russian people. Instead, he emphasised that the war had demonstrated the strength of Soviet multinationalism and the unity of the peoples of the USSR. In 1947 he rejected a reference to the leading role of the Russian people in the draft of a newly proposed party programme. In his greetings to Moscow the city’s historical contribution to Russian statehood was counter-balanced by celebration of its role in Soviet socialist construction. The Russians most lauded by Stalin were the post-revolutionary generations. As Zhdanov put it in August 1946: ‘We are no longer the Russians we were before 1917. Our Russia (Rus’) is no longer the same . . . We have changed and have grown along with the great transformations that have radically altered the face of our country.’216
The international status of Russian science was very much on Stalin’s mind after the war. In a 1946 book about the role of Russian scientists in the development of world science, he marked their contributions to fields such as electronic communications, atomic physics, seismology and magnetism.217 In a 1948 journal article he highlighted claims concerning the Russian contribution to medical science.218